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Chapter One As a child his ability to act was bound by the paternalistic system of his clan's Judaism, with its commandments to adhere and obey; not to question but to follow. As modernity began to encroach on the settlements — protected for so long by their isolation and deliberate unwillingness to assimilate into society — the children of Singer's generation were exposed to an option. No longer were they tricked into obedience by the isolationist's forswearing of worldly attractions. The firm hand that had for centuries kept the Jewish people together as a tribe — scattered but bonded by a common belief — was losing its clout, as exposure to an alternative way of life offered more to those who had been deprived. The Polish Jews Singer writes about were until this time protected from earthly distraction by an insistence on a straight and narrow course that segregated their traditions and texts from the rest of the world. They had a very strict regimen of daily ritual and observance that was meant to be all inclusive, necessitating an abhorence of what they perceived as the impurities of any other way. The Jews, in other words, were not sustaining themselves in a vacuum — their heritage was a rich one, and had kept them together as a people through centuries of hardship, frequent homelessness, and dispersion — but they shut out the influences of secular society as much as possible. Political events in the first decades of this century threatened their very existence. As much as they would have liked to remain cloistered from the partitions and breakups of kingdoms and nation-states going on all over Eastern Europe, there was no way to remain oblivious. These developments were bound to encroach on their separate but at the time peaceful settlements. Zionist societies were established, Bolshevik alliances were formed. The prayer houses were shaken into upheaval with members committing to worldly matters. There was much shouting, as the old ways were infiltrated with a need for alertness to the new situations. In these tumultuous years it was no longer safe or possible to remain an anachronism. The speeded-up tempo of events as the nineteenth century became the twentieth, reshaped alliances and boundaries in a frenzy of aggression that would explode into World War I. It also brought European and Russian literature, exported in translation from America, into the Jewish communities, along with shipments of white flour. Once infected with the audacity of free will, questioning, and discontent with the dogma and narrowness of his tribe, Singer rebelled as one must who wishes to grow and to expand his horizons. The self-contained world of the shtetl and the restrictive focus of his faith were too narrow, too binding to one who had tasted the fruits of different choices. It was not traveling or actual exposure to the cosmopolitan center that changed him; it was exposure to the notions that he found in literature of people expressing feelings, longings, and aspirations. For Singer, containment to the ghetto meant a continuing of suffering. The closed doors of his culture meant repression, a cutting off of any attempt to liberate the spirit. Ironically, the Hasidic lore he often deals with expounds a strict adherence to its customs as a means of liberation — the soul's liberation at death to its reward of Heaven. But Singer was too devoted to his people's earthly suffering and staked his claim by writing tales that acknowledged human weaknesses in the face of impossible strivings for the ideal. Singer, following I.L. Peretz, introduced an intellectuality to the Yiddish story. Ambivalence and questioning were radical innovations to a line of culture that attempted to perpetuate itself by sticking to its roots and imposing its morals and strict directions on its people. While Singer and Peretz took comfort in the history of their culture and wrapped a cloak of affection around themselves and their people, they realized that the order must be questioned. Questioning, of course, introduces discontent and anxiety. Rather than stay sheltered in the rules of a system in order to find contentment in the obedience to and following of its rituals, behaving as it were, the skeptic takes a giant step outside the confining walls into a territory of unsecured possibilities, a field of dangers and possible fulfillments. Giving up devotion to family, religious family, and cultural community places one in the lonely realm of personal searching. The entire skeleton of faith which until this time had given people something to which to adhere was now, for thinkers like Singer, rejected. Faith alone was now seen as a deliberate blindness to the actualities of the world that Singer could not adhere to any longer. It cut off too much of the geographical world, but more importantly, disallowed the range of worlds within oneself. Singer is writing in the tradition of the European novelists when he offers an evocative portrayal of his surroundings. One becomes immersed in a nostalgia for the village life he re-creates. The characters are fleshed out. Their actions result from anxieties and motivations plainly described. We feel as if things could not have turned out differently. There is, however, a sense of responsibility for one's actions. Though Singer acknowledges that humans cannot and should not be expected to be as continuously gracious as the forefathers demand, morality is still holding things together: You do not seduce the rabbi's daughter and run away without paying, at least in anguish. While in Western Europe at this time Jewish advancements were being made in the host countries' languages and were aligned with Western (bourgeoisie) values, the movement in Eastern Europe, given the name Haskala (from the Hebrew word meaning "awakening" or "rebirth"), aligned itself with Jewish values and was written in Yiddish and Hebrew. This movement, according to Max Dimont, "expressed the cultural nationalism of the middle classes....Like a Freudian libido flowing through the unconscious, attaching itself to previous psychic experiences, the Haskala flowed through the body of Judaism, attaching itself to former Jewish values and creating new ones" (342-43). Singer rejected the writers of the Haskala as "spiritually destructive" (Landis 7) in their urge to achieve modernity for the Jews at the expense of shedding traditional values. He firmly pointed out the propagandistic qualities of such a movement, which in its determination to be accepted overlooked the personal fragments and details that Singer felt particular attraction to, and that create the spice and make up the formidable characteristics of an individual. Singer insisted on just these singular qualities that identify a specific individual. He also felt the Yiddish writers of his generation and those of the generation preceeding him were straying from Jewish learning. For Singer, who never gave up the urge for some piety, his struggle becomes throughout all his writing a conflict with God. Having rejected the faith of his father as a way of life for himself, he still cannot purge himself of his fond regard for it. In his memoirs and his fiction, the same story is basically told over and over of a man (he rarely narrates in a female voice) reconciling with his decision to allow the presence of a God whose command of dailyness he has usurped. Singer speaks of his father's unworldliness in heroic terms (especially in the memoir In My Father's Court) and finds great comfort in regarding his father's faith and commitment to piety, because Singer sees in it a way not to be tortured by the fires of doubt. Despite the peace he sees that faith can bring to adherents, he rejected it as a way of life for himself before he was twenty years old. But he would be returning to it, revisiting it in his writing, for as long as he lived. Joseph Landis points out that it was not merely the exposure to secular attractions that damaged Singer's faith but a contemplation, begun very young, of the hardships and cruelties he saw around him that Singer regarded as "God's dereliction of duty" (15). It is this perception that prevents Singer from being a simple storyteller, one who entertains to alleviate a few bored moments. Singer could not fathom how God could allow such cruelty as he witnessed or read about: how animals in the wild would devour weaker animals, how the sufferings of people can be brought about by the cruelty of an oppressor. He could not, however, quite dismiss God as a controlling entity: I said to myself: I believe in God, I fear Him, yet I cannot love Him — not with my whole heart and soul as the Torah commands nor with the amor dei intellectualis that Spinoza demands (Singer, quoted in Landis 16).The battle never ends. In Meshugah, written in the early 1980s but published in English in Spring 1994, a Singer character continues to wage the battle, albeit with more anger and boldness than previously: How much longer, God, will you look on this inferno of yours and keep silent? What need have you of this ocean of blood and flesh, whose stench spreads across your universe? Or is the universe no more than heaps of dung? Are trillions and quadrillions of creatures tortured on other planets as well? Have you created this boundless slaughterhouse merely to show us your powers and your wisdom? Are we commanded to love you with our hearts, our souls, for this? (45)The conflict, then, puts him in a quandary: How do you battle a foe you cannot see, a foe that you can only conceptualize? It provides Singer with a theme he will use as a catalyst his entire career, an appropriate and affecting dialogue for this century, which has seen priorities shifted with unprecedented speed, and one indeterminate value superceded by another as the need arises and convenience permits. Landis sees it as an "unresolved psychic struggle of this writer in exile" (19) that heightens his sensitivity to moral boundaries and makes him acutely aware of the capacity for evil. Singer firmly believed in God, and he belonged to a temple on the Upper West Side (his rabbi accompanied him to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in 1978), but he chose at an early age not to become enmeshed in the ways of his fathers. Rather, he makes the choice to accept the ordinariness of day to day life (which in his work becomes not-so-ordinary). He brings a secular consciousness to his tales of shtetl life in the vanished communities of his youth. That is, he writes as a member of the worldly community for other members of the worldly community. His focus is most often the Jewish population of Eastern Europe around the turn of the century, but his themes — passions, fallibilities, doubts, aspirations — are applicable to any people. He steadfastly chose to write in Yiddish his entire career (after a brief start in Hebrew); yet his stories, in translation, have spread to a wide and appreciative public beyond a Yiddish-reading audience. Seemingly rife with contradictions, Singer's steps into twentiethth-century consciousness are weighed with the attempt to untangle himself from what he perceived as the restraints of a strictly religious way of life in order to lead an earthly, ethical existence. While perhaps ninety percent of his work portrays the Jews of Poland in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, his universals are given priority over the specifics of his characterizations. The attention to detail brings the narratives to a heightened aliveness, but what we connect with in his characters are those traits we have in common with them. William H. Gass calls it the "primitive materiality of [Singer's] approach" (2) that allows us access to these very foreign characters, and triggers a comfortable identification with their motivations and an understanding of their actions. Writing of a vanished world from his modern perspective, Singer displays a sense of irony that magnifies the honesty of the storytelling, already intensified by Singer's writerly vitality. Contrasting forces — stories of peasants told from a cosmopolitan viewpoint — bring each into sharper focus. "Singer frequently chooses a subject which might be called 'the coming of modern consciousness,'" Gass writes, "but the form of his fiction denies it ever came" (2). The work of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza helped Singer to push beyond the confines of his religious indoctrination. His exposure as a young man to Spinoza's writing is the climax of his youthful voyage of discovery. As recounted in In My Father's Court: The Spinoza book created a turmoil in my brain...As I read this book, I felt intoxicated, inspired as I never had been before. It seemed to me that the truths I had been seeking since childhood had at last become apparent. Everything was God — Warsaw, Bilgoray, the spider in the attic...Everything was divine, everything was thought and extension...I was exalted... (305)Singer understood in Spinoza a system capable of offering a viable alternative to the conception of the universe he grew up with. It is a vision that encourages personal responsibility for achieving moral order. This, along with encouragement from his rationalist older brother, and exposure to Russian and Western European novels, gave Singer the courage to look out at the universe from within the confines of his religious community, which abhored earthly attachments and forbade any participation with secular society. With this ammunition, Singer was strong enough to leave the path his parents and people intended for him. He set out for a place in the world, finding that he could allow the details of a story to give him the grounding he needed for living in modern times. However, clinging to a system of outmoded beliefs, Singer's modern pilgrim carries a good deal of baggage that restricts his possibilities, often making him (the Singer protagonist is almost always male) intolerant, distrustful, and disrespectful of others' needs and desires. His demand for personal salvation blinds him to the effect he is having on those around him. His push toward meaning is so determined that he will leave a wake of victims as a justified expense. Singer lacked an openness to vagueness, to the unresolvable. Because of Singer's need to feel in control and in his desperate scrambling to impose meaning on the randomness of events, his characters are doomed to failure; he sets them up in a contest they cannot win. So strong is their compulsion to attain personal significance that those people they come in contact with often suffer as they are abused, in what the protagonists perceive as a singular fight for survival. The personal search becomes misguided as it detaches further and further into unredemptive isolation. Singer's protagonists yearn for power over that which eludes them. These characters create a situation that is not resolvable and this elusiveness, ironically, feeds their attachment to the system. In their obsessive desire to gain mastery over the fragments and chaos of life, to try to impose their own framework over the entirety of their lives, they continue in their pursuit, believing that gaining an advantage of power will be their fulfillment. As they and as we readers find repeatedly, this is never enough. A basic sense of security is so lacking that neither authority, privilege, nor any position of power is adequate to disguise their sense of emptiness. In trying to augment his allegiance to faith to quell his vast irritation, Singer takes some steps to emerge from total servitude. However, he is limited in his progress because he does not look far beyond his own tradition for models. Once he has attempted to assert individuality he keeps returning to and relying on this system that tells him he is wayward for having abandoned it and the cycle of escape and retreat begins over again. Chapter 2 |