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Chapter Two In Singer's stories the temptations the Devil dangles before his susceptible victims are usually presented as an easy road out of one's present condition to a realm of possibilities heretofore yearned for but untasted. Clearly the Devil figures are set up as forces intent on disturbing the righteous, the implication being that a judgment is being made of what is correct and what is disdainful. Ruth R. Wisse points to Singer's use of Devil figures as a means he uses to explore morality in an otherwise realistic setting. The imps, she states, operate within boundaries governed by the same principles as a realistic tale, but these stories, set up with a realistic backdrop, lead one to believe the strange occurrences are not really that impossible. Passionate impulses ascribed to Singer's monstrous creatures do not seem so discordant because of the casual, sober tone of the storytelling (Paradoxical 152-3). For the Jewish population chronicled in Singer's tales and memoirs, the one overriding point of Jewishness, the defining of one's identity as a Jew, is an observance of the rituals, including prayer, and an attachment to the study of the religious texts. To stray from this prescribed role is to threaten the fabric of one's personal identity as a Jew as well as the stability of the Jewish community, which is sustained only as long as there is homogeneity among its members. Without a visible God, the Jews have had to rely on faith and a respect for the authority of the traditional sacred books. While God's existence is defined by a lack of presence, the Devil makes himself readily available to those willing to listen. In fact, the Devil often appears in Singer's stories as a figure intent on bringing destruction to innocent figures whom he chooses merely as playthings in his line of work. It is the Devil's purpose to bring ruin to individuals one by one. He might appear to one already straying or to one noble in his or her deeds. He will appear in a righteous household as unexpectedly as he will intrude somewhere else. As the time frames of Singer's stories procede into the twentieth century, the Devil takes on the new conditions of secularity as a temptation to the righteous who were formerly untainted by these particular possibilities. The Devil becomes, as Irving H. Buchen states, "the archetype of the modernist...Singer uses Satan to bring renewed dread and urgency to moral dilemmas and to make ethical decision a mode of self-creation or of self-destruction" (24-5). This makes for quite a conflict for these characters who all grapple in some measure with emerging from their restrictive but defined traditional identity as Jews and acclimating to the twentieth century amid the diaspora. With their homeland destroyed and their population scattered, these Jews are confronted with a double displacement. Not only are they denied comfort in their familiar, long established neighborhoods and communities, but they are also wrought from village life to an industrial age with its attendant impersonalizing. The predominant method Satan utilizes in Singer's work to take advantage of these fragile conditions, as Buchen observes, "is to persuade man that he is self-sufficient and therefore no longer needs God" (26). Rewards of sexual pleasure or business success are never enough for those male characters we follow in Singer's work. We never lose a sense of Singer's attitude that you can run but not hide from the inevitability of God's demand for sublimation and subserviance. Those who dare stray are doomed to doubt, and to thirst for a fulfillment that will not come as long as one denies the authority of God as nurturer. Heaven is available only to those who admit God into their lives. There is no rest for those who choose the secular path, which is always portrayed as an unending, and therefore chaotic and unquenching, choice. As the character Adele observes of the protagonist Asa Heschel Bannet in Singer's The Family Moskat: "He was one of those who must serve God or die. He had forsaken God, and because of this he was dead — a living body with a dead soul" (582). Asa, perhaps the most delineated and most prominent of Singer's characters, coming as he does in Singer's largest book, epitomizes the secular ideal in Singer's writing. He suffers a fate typical for Singer's characters: those who take on a notion of self-sufficiency eventually find themselves in a cul-de-sac of paralysis, overwhelmed by the immense loneliness and isolation that comes with daring to create a sense of place in a universe independent of God. The Family Moskat belongs with a series of family epics — along with The Estate and The Manor — that chronicle the effects of modernity's encroachment on the traditional values and ways of life of several families in Poland, from the last half of the nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. Grace Farrell Lee sees the families tangled in the replacement of their old, familiar values with modern demands. She sees their dilemma in a series of "parallel dichotomies — Hasidism versus the Enlightenment, preservation of faith versus assimilation, shtetl versus modern society. Each dichotomy can be reduced to one — that which gives meaning and purpose to life versus that which undermines it" (Exile 77). The character Asa Heshel Bannet emerges as the protagonist of the saga and he epitomizes the disintegration of the old ways. However, tragically, while shedding the restraints and belief systems of the tradition, he is unable to form himself into anything new. Stripped of faith, he is incapable of constructing a universe with enough meaning to sustain, let alone nurture, him. This inability to achieve a meaning independent of past models can only lead to a sense of failure and despair. The character is presented as having only two options: continue as things once were, which is impossible, or to find significance in a new system that rejects the past. As long as his characters keep looking back, relying on past experience to validate their emerging sense of self, they are doomed to remain dwarfed by their dependence on the narrow prescriptions of that earlier identity. While Asa, and characters like Asa, attempt to leave their tradition, a paradox intrudes as Singer struggles to integrate the familiarity of his old-world values into the complexities of the new world order his characters face on the move from the shtetls to Warsaw or America. The geographical dislocation serves as a convenient background for the more involved realignment his characters are pitted against. And it is layed out as a struggle, as an argument, as a raging debate that permeates the entirety of his writing. His perspective always seems to favor the character who finds the right way to act within whatever environment or circumstance he finds himself. His sympathy for his characters is plain; their moral struggles are delineated in such detail that the characters are obviously familiar and connected to the authorial presence. The ultimate message seems to be that had the shtetl existence continued, none of these concerns of conscience would have arisen. This problem becomes pronounced, Wisse says, in Singer's later stories and novels, where the scene is contemporary. This is where his bias against modern developments works against him and displays, ultimately, a lack of sophistication. His characters and his authorial point of view are limited by his allegiance to the past. The possibility of development, or grappling with complexities, is shunned for a sentimental nostalgia for the ways things used to be. His dependence on supernatural elements, while charming and universal in its good-versus-evil simplicity, is a retreat from intellectual investigation. The folk tones of his 'old country' characters "sound distressingly hollow in the mouths of modern Jews trying to make some sense of their fate" (157). The Magician of Lublin, for example, narrates the experience of Yasha Mazur, a magician, who having tasted of the secular pleasures in Warsaw, returns to his roots and a life of isolation. The choice is extreme, with no consideration for the middle ground. In this story, first published in English in 1960, Yasha reaches a crescendo of spiritual crisis after years of wandering freely, indulging himself in all the pleasures available to a man in such a position. These sensual delights are not enough, however, to alleviate a nagging desire he feels for a deeper fulfillment. So extreme was he in his hedonism that he decides, near the book's end, that his doubt can only be alleviated by the draconian measure of having himself walled up in a brick cell, where he can escape temptation and, by devoting himself to study of the holy books, find redemption by returning to the Jewish roots he has denied previously. Singer's own comments about his creation, in the Author's Note to a fine art edition of the book, defines the struggle: To me the protagonist, Yasha Mazur, personified a hedonist who longed for the pleasures of this world and yet knew beforehand that they were nothing but illusions and vanity; a man who was both possessed by passions and afraid of them, a sinner who denied the existence of God yet prayed to Him in time of distress. (Magician 1983, viii)While his penance seems drastic to his wife, and even the town's rabbi attempts to dissuade him before relenting and offering a blessing, to us readers, conditioned to extremes in Yasha's behavior, this act seems as believable as anything his previous recklessness could give rise to. In fact, he does not have it so bad. His wife is bringing him three meals a day and has remained faithful, the townspeople have made him a sort of sainted counselor to whom they confide their troubles, and he is alive and venerated for his act of salvation after leaving a trail of tatters that includes a suicide. Yasha at the peak of his crisis attempted a robbery but, nervous at transgression into lawlessness that would be recognized and punishable in court, he bumbles the robbery although he manages to escape. He does not escape, however, from the effect this dastardliness has on his conscience. It is the last straw that points out to him the state of wretchedness he has allowed himself to descend to. At this point he breaks from his romantic involvements, the chapter ends, and the long Epilogue picks up three years later to recount the story of his penance. The book even ends with a letter from one of his former lovers forgiving him everything, taking the blame on herself for the impossibility of their affair continuing, announcing that their time together was the best period of her life, praising his commitment to righting himself, and even offering some relief to him, calling the punishment he has inflected on himself too severe. While we can see Yasha's transformation as heroic, and admire his action for his intense commitment and sacrifice, we can also say it is peculiar, and that his act of divorcing himself from his former ways continues to leave those closest to him unsatisfied. His retreat might also be seen as a retreat into tradition, a running away and a deliberate choice to ignore the reality of the modernity he has witnessed in Warsaw. This man is awarded his spiritual salvation because he has a wife willing to wait years for his return, who must then be further deprived at his return of any domestic normalcy when he decides to wall himself up. He has used several women along the way who, for whatever their reasons, have allowed him his unfaithfulness and footloose lack of commitment. These social transgressions are somehow excusable and acceptable in his path to righteousness. The book seems heavily indebted to Crime and Punishment in its exploring of the darkness of the doubting soul. It is a weight that is rational in its meditation but burdensome to the tale. We can sympathize with the pain of Yasha's soul-searching and understand the gnawing doubt that afflicts him, but Singer is less successful here than in any of his other books in allowing readers to interpret for themselves. In contradicting his own edict to edit out as much as possible, he slows down the pace to a plodding crawl. His moralizing and the predictability of his manipulations — the suffering wanderer reaches peace by returning to the fold — is poured on too thick and heavy in this novel. His characters in the book are lively, and their motivations and longings are believable. He paints the surroundings with his usual mastery, evoking with rich details so we can feel the environment sensually — we can hear the market chatter, smell the odors. However, there is something disturbing about the choice Singer offers his protagonist: either a hell of unresolved conflicts or a surrender to a hermetic devotion to God. These two options, it is made plain, are the only two availabilities. It is as if there were no other possibilities. Similarly, Shosha, whom the autobiographical character Aaron Greidinger marries in Shosha, reappears to the narrator after he has tasted the pleasures and experienced the licentiousness of pre-World War II Poland. Shosha, who had been his childhood friend, has remained in the old neighborhood. When he runs into her after a lapse of several years, she has not changed and is portrayed in an exaggerated manner, even as being stunted in intelligence. So anachronistic is her presence in the story that she seems like a ghost. Yet Aaron, despite his worldliness and involvement with more interesting, sophisticated women, is drawn to her, for she carries with her the roots of his old life. He chooses the familiar, unquestioning loyalty of the traditional over the complexities of his other women tainted with modern anxieties. Shosha dies almost concurrently with their forced removal from the ghetto as the war encroaches, a convenient illustration of the era's ending. As Wisse points out, this novel's strange rewriting of Singer's own life would seem to be a fantasy of atonement, as if Singer were exploring the path he should have chosen rather than the path he took in actuality. This deliberate decision seems strange in the context of the optimism we see in Singer's stories of the shtetls. Is he saying that the person who leaves God and chooses a secular existence must suffer penance, and is fated to have no choice but to die in retreat amidst what they had earlier tried to abandon? There seems to be an odd sense of guilt pervading Singer's motivation here. He himself escaped Warsaw in 1935, an act entirely necessary for his own survival. Is his subsequent recounting of events, his fictionalization of himself in the characters of Asa and Aaron, an offering of apology for having abandoned his tradition? It is difficult to get to that part of his psyche that will not allow his characters to survive and to evolve. Why must these narratives end tragically and not offer hope in the face of the brutal reality of the Holocaust? Why has Singer, so realistic a writer otherwise, chosen here to alter the chronicle of his own experience to create a fictional account that distorts his own truth into a sentimental nostalgia for what no longer is? We can say that he is asking us to see these two narrators as victims of atrocities and that their stories are a focus on two of the personal tragedies that occurred within the massive, and perhaps, impersonal, destruction of that vast culture. We can also say that Asa Heschel and Aaron Greidinger choose martyrdom. It is hard to see the heroic in their choice, however, given the option of escape they each were repeatedly offered. Or, perhaps, Singer is offering, as Hana Wirth-Nesher points out, a portrait of a vanished world that he once knew and can no longer travel back to. In his state of orphanhood, all he can accomplish is giving testimony to a way of life that has disappeared and that he mourns. His characters' denial, then, must be seen as symbolic of the genocide and strangling of Yiddish culture. Singer's story, "The Little Shoemakers" is a tender tale of a shoemaker and his sons reunited in America after the father's suffering and displacement as a result of World War II. Once together again they take up the work they had left off. What makes the story upbeat at the end is a rejection of modernity and an embrace of traditional values — displayed by the father and sons reunited at the workbench, singing the old songs. The old man, freshly arrived in America, is totally oblivious to his surroundings and uninterested in the new situation. He dodders, and seems to be decaying, until a re-creation of his old workroom is fashioned for him in a shed in the backyard of one of his son's homes. Here he is able to recapture his relationship with his tools and his pride at fashioning shoes, as well as the pleasure of his sons' company, isolated but at peace avoiding the nearby modern world. The 1974 novel The Penitent is, for Wisse, an even more forced morality. The narrator, at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, encounters Joseph Shapiro, a recent emigrant from America who has risen up the ladder of prosperity, lost his soul in the process, and has now come to the Holy Land to purify himself. Like Greidinger in Shosha, who found comfort in the old neighborhood, Shapiro discovers peace in the Orthodox section of Jerusalem "that is the closest approximation of the pre-Enlightenment shtetl" (Wisse "Paradoxical" 158). Having given up the follies of modern existence, Shapiro marries and settles into this new life of renunciation. Perhaps, Wisse concludes, this is the only possible solution Singer can manage for his characters, adrift in the secular world of limitless choices. In Meshugah, which chronicles a group of Jews in New York in the early fifties, Singer declares that he and his main love interest in the book, Miriam, are destined not to have children since they are "the last of a generation" (228). Having come through the Holocaust, the Singer protagonist — again he is given the name Aaron Greidinger — is so nostalgic and mournful for what has disappeared that he has no strength left to imagine a self-created future. Again distorts the actuality of his life to reflect a despondency in eulogizing the decimation of his past. More than in any of his books, the older author retreats back to his heritage for reassurance and support, sprinkling passages and expressions from the Jewish holy books throughout the narrative. The climax of the novel is even a trip to Israel, ostensibly to visit an ailing friend and to be reunited with Miriam, but which serves more particularly as an excuse to meditate on the conditions of the modern Jew. While Singer is still ornery and audacious enough to assert his independence from his fellow Jews on a level of religious faith, the novel seems directed at pleasing his Jewish audience by inserting an overabundance of details and references to Jewish history, ancient and modern. The book is like a family album that admits some of the traif, the blemishes. It is one of those novels whose real subject is the author's self-consciousness. What little plot there is is merely a disguise for the author's attribution of qualities and interpretation to the proceedings. The self-conscious paralleling of actuality is less compelling, in this instance, than a story simply told, laden as a story is with its own drama for a satisfying resolution. Singer is destined for trouble in his morality conflicts because he depends on the Bible's dichotomy of good and evil as the governing principle in human existence. When all striving must be toward the good, this obligation inflicts a ton of self-hatred on everyone who knows they are not one hundred per cent good. Singer's struggle is a continual urging to defy human susceptibility and weakness, and to attain Heaven, to attain an impossible idealistic eventuality. If one strays too far, ruin is delivered. It is a hard argument to find fault with. Of course we applaud those characters who will themselves past diversionary temptations, because we are set up to believe that "goodness" is good and everything else must be a digression from the noble path to goodness. Singer succeeds in making his characters believable due to our identification with their weaknesses and our empathy with their conflicts. However, we as readers are continually enlisted to accept the tenets of Singer's emphasis on making the right choice. Like a magnetic attraction, the attitude is tilted toward that biblical prototype of pleasure and fulfillment being ripped away from those who defy the authority of the paternity. Those who presume to accept responsibility for attaining their own enlightenment are doomed, as warned in Genesis, to exile and deprivation of the ultimate fruit. The Bible, M.H. Abrams explains, revised the pattern of historical cycles held by classical antiquity — a process of decay and restoration — and froze all of history into the rigid fate outlined within its pages. With its exegesis of history from first day to last, the Bible sets up a distinctive design that is "finite...has a clearly defined plot...is providential" (35). This view forced believers to continually compare events in their own lives to parallel occurrences in the Bible, to always be forcing a comparison, looking to gauge their behavior by that of the sacred heroes. This view, Abrams explains, forces a dualistic approach to experience, as the notion of God's design is imposed on viewable and experienced phenomenon. Sam Girgus sees this dichotomy of the struggle between good and evil as a conservative ideology on Singer's part: "It condemns mankind into permanent encapsulation in a world without transcendence or ultimate meaning — a world limited by the abridged horizon of man's vision" (135). It also makes cattle of its adherents by promising them salvation in a next world, thus alleviating them of any responsibility in this one. Singer is a "romantic" for fantasizing and believing that the relocation to a more idyllic time with leisure and support from enigmatic sources is possible. He is relying on a biblical example, failing to address concerns of a "modern" time. His message, even in its rallying for empowerment, seems to yearn for a nostalgia for earlier models, which subdues the noble intent of his message. He seeks for, as Abrams puts it, "the gradual progress of all mankind toward the great consummation" (61). For Singer, who feels caught up in this swelling toward apocalypse, the one way to exercise some resistance is to exert the will. He creates Satan so that the choice between good and evil is distinguishable. In an interview with Grace Farrell Lee, Singer declares his dichotomous view of things, seeing the presence of Satan/evil necessary as a means of distinguishing the good: The material world is a combination of seeing and blindness. The blindness we call Satan. If we would become all seeing, we would not have free choice anymore. Because, if we would see God, if we would see His greatness, there would be no temptation or sin. And since God wanted us to have free will this means that Satan, in other words the principle of evil, must exist. Because what does free choice mean? It means the freedom to choose between good and evil. If there is no evil, there is no freedom (Farrell Conversations 157).What Singer recognizes, and one of the major appeals of his work, is that his characters are not engaged in allegorical lessons, as occurs in his predecessor's work, where characters are given a bit of personality to make them appealing and identifiable as types, but who are there mainly to serve as players in the morality tale. Singer became a "modern" writer when he refocused the intent of the story from a lecture on how to behave. His major step was to give priority to the character, and not to the judgmental voice that would keep the characters in a realm of ideals and impossible goodness. By admitting choice into the fabric — not as a decision that must be made but as a process contingent on elements we all share — Singer secularized the discussion and, despite his writing in Yiddish his entire life, separated himself from the Yiddish tradition to ally himself with more general humanistic aspects. For Singer, how well a person responds to the various crises one inevitably faces determines individuality. He appeals to the "good," just choices we should make, but acknowledges the vagueness, loss of critical judgment, and failures we all experience as inevitable and understandable. In the novel Scum, written late in Singer's life, the protagonist Max Barabander gets away with abusive behavior for a good long while — the length of the novel — but ends up in prison for his failure to find any form of redemption. In the opening pages of Scum we find out a lot about Max Barabander. Information is unfurled in a matter of fact, storytelling way. We find out he is on a pleasure trip to get away from his wife, who is despondent over the death of their seventeen-year-old son. He carries his money and passport in his breast pocket; having been a thief himself, he fears being robbed. In fact, he also carries a gun. He is forty-seven years old, but looks younger. He owns property in Argentina that has made him a rich man. He is vice-president of an orphanage. These details of his biography provide information. His vitality is illustrated on these opening pages by his eagerness to know the details of a little item he reads in a Yiddish newspaper: A woman in Egypt has given birth to six children, all dead. Max wonders: Will they be buried together in a single plot? Were they boys or girls? His zest for life is evident in his choice to take care of himself by making this trip, rather than falling into the obsessive grief his wife has allowed to consume her: If a youth of seventeen can complain of a headache and ten minutes later breathe his last, then man's existence is not worth a puff of smoke. Somehow Max had forced himself to put this calamity out of his mind, but his wife, Rochelle, had become half-crazed. (4-5)Right away we are provided with quite a broad profile of Max and his situation. Of course, the gun in his pocket is an indication of some future tension. But we also know that he has a return ticket so can expect the best: the fulfillment and completeness of the circular, the return home. This is not, however, how the novel ends up. By the time of the novel's finish, some two hundred pages later, we have followed Max through a series of misadventures and choices that lead him further and further into risk and away from the stability and domesticity he left in Argentina. His choices, as he deals with the loss of his son and assertions of manhood in his balding phase, become more and more abandoned as he struggles to claim his vitality in a series of irresponsible acts that, unredeemed, can only lead him to imprisonment, no longer fit for inhabiting an ethical society. Max makes wrong choices, it is clear, but the author's intent is also to allow for the inevitability of those choices, to show the frailty of the human character faced with choices. Max has options; he has a return ticket in his pocket. Yet his frenzied charge into life — his desperate desire for the proof of his attraction to women, in which he believes he will find evidence of his essentialness — affects his destiny beyond the reasonableness we, as readers, feel is necessary. Singer infuses the book with his compassion for his creation. Obviously, there is sympathy for this man faced with the void; we are made to feel Max's anxiety. The novel is an explication of that crisis: afforded the luxury of desirability and privileged with the accoutrements of success and comfort, how is one to act? What route is available to a twentieth-century person freed from the bondage to sustenance? The religious community that Max is peripherally involved with no longer has any influence on his acts. His local secular community has provided him with the sustenance that affords him the privilege of traveling. His teenage son has died and his wife has turned away from him. Max feels none of the constraints of any of those institutions. He has no obligations; he is beyond edicts. He questions their relevance and discards their structures in his own pursuit of meaning. He casts off, simply rebels against any dogma as restrictive. Freedom intoxicates this man. Finding himself in a position to do what he likes, Max charges ahead, fueled with the autonomy of his situation, unshackled by familial obligations or religious guidelines. But where is he headed? His compulsion to escape the patterns of his domestic life defines his actions as rebellious. Max is far removed from his origins in Eastern Europe, where demons were a very active part of consciousness, giving form to unexplainable dreads. Demons, while dismissed by some more "modern" characters in Singer's fiction, are nonetheless a given, accepted characteristic of the village/tribal consciousness Singer is so acclaimed for portraying. In this later work, Max starts from a land removed geographically from the land where these notions held sway. Max has suppressed his anxieties in his unwillingness to confront the demons that Jung calls "primitive characteristics that formed part of the original mind" (88). In Max's self-delusion in thinking he can run away (from family in Argentina as well as his more general sense of stifled consciousness), he deliberately wills himself not to regard just those aspects of critical self-reflection he is most in need of regarding. Max is a splendid example of Jung's man with repressed fears. The more you fail to confront your dreads, "the more they spread through the whole personality in the form of a neurosis" (88-89). Psychologically, Max is a divided personality. He has rejected his religious dogmas, his family obligations, and any sense of ethical standard. But in all that rejection, he has found only a pursuit of carnal pleasure with which to try and fulfill himself. His escapades carry him farther and farther into recklessness, as he finds himself less and less sated. His desperation, his floundering, as he refuses to acknowledge any attachment that might quiet the urgency in his psyche/soul, isolates him, and finally exiles him to a prison cell. Singer, in his acceptance of spirits and demons in his earlier work, gave a basis to his character's irrational fears and superstitions, an explanation that Jung validates as necessary. Max might be said to be "no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional 'unconscious identity' with natural phenomena" (Jung 85). Singer was not writing this story strictly as a moral tale. Affairs and mistaken choices are prevalent throughout his novels and short stories. But whereas formerly these situations were couched in an acceptance of attractions without a begrudging of the mischief involved, in Scum, written late in his career, 1967, a darkness descends. There is less allowance for the bouncing around of human destinies that knits people together in unexpected, unforetold ways. Max goes too far; there is no purpose to his acts other than to verify his own powers. He uses these powers for his own need for seduction. He is running away from his soul, his conscious. Jewish belief, as explained in The Thirteen Petalled Rose, sees the soul as an element of the Divine, and as therefore a "manifestation of God in the world" (51). It differentiates between the visible world and the soul, ascribing a quality of potential to the soul that links it with the divine. This potential is a freedom of will derived from the divine will that enables one to create or destroy. In his rejection of that aspect of divine power, Max voids his connection to his own inner essence. Acknowledging the soul's need to descend into matter, Steinsaltz explains that this journey is necessary "in order to make the desired ascent to hitherto unknown heights" (54). Max refuses or is unable to pull himself out of the depths. He is a destroyer; he uses the people with whom he comes in contact to affirm his ability to affect. The five women whom he entices in the course of this story are all used for the moment, and abandoned when he moves on or has another self-indulgent crisis of anxiety. He is wavering. He attacks in a frenzy to destroy those establishments that in former times had been held sacred. Singer constantly distinguishes between sexual love and mere lust, as Bonnie Lyons has noticed, and she sees couplings in Singer as an act of "personal psychic integration..." (61). Although Lyons concludes that sexual union is an act of attachment and binding intimacy in Singer's work, the fact is that, despite the evidence she presents, in Singer's work union is often not enough; or, there is a predominance of characters who fail to accept closeness as a lasting attachment. More often than not Singer's characters believe sexual gratification and the conquest involved will be enough to fulfill the unsettled feelings in their inner beings. Max is so wayward he goes directly for the heart of what was for him the most rigid and stable element of his and his community's existence — the rabbi's court. In his seduction of Tsirele, the rabbi's daughter, we see the dissolution of the strictest system of obedience. This, the episode infused with the most consequence, is the breaking point for Max. Once he crosses this boundary, he is never able to regroup. He loses respect for himself and encourages and allows more dangerous liaisons to occur. What, Singer asks, can be reshaped from the destruction of the former routines of existence? How can the modern person derive meaning from existence, once past the insular community situations he left at the very beginning of this century? Singer's question, of course, is the question in the age of anxiety, and it is not a question easily resolved. Max Barabander has lost God and any other belief system capable of replacing the concept of God. Clearly, Max proves that a diet of physical gratification is incapable of sustaining him. Even the sense of power he receives from his conquests/seductions is a fleeting sensation that can only be a momentary relief. His soul/psyche is too agitated by his fleeing. He even resorts to seances — in an attempt to make contact with his dead son — in his search for answers. Seeing through that charade, he satisfies himself by making physical contact with the medium. What Max lacks, according to The Thirteen Petalled Rose, is the ability to make the vital choice of repenting. He fails to see that his waywardness could be stopped with a reflective look inside himself and a decision to begin anew, to build again from the powers of his will. This book views repentence as "the highest expression of man's capacity to choose freely" (25), seeing in this idea an action that expresses control over what has been done, a way to ascend beyond the limitations of past deeds, and to alter the significance of those experiences. The anxieties Max might be said to be expressing for the twentieth-century condition reflects desire for a stability that is no longer available. Once the allegiance to religious tenets is severed, responsibility for action and for making choices becomes an even heavier burden for the individual. If Max is motivated by a gnawing at his consciousness to flee deeper and deeper into retreat from responsible action, Singer is emphasizing Max's failure to take control of his own fate, to steer a more enlightened course. In fact, Jewish thought, as Steinsaltz explains, encourages a constant striving for good that refutes inner tranquility as a complacency that limits personal growth. One who is content stops seeking, and the divine as infinite implies a constant striving, a constant state of active seeking. "Repentence does not bring a sense of serenity or of completion but stimulates a reaching out in further effort" (132). Max allows himself to be controlled by circumstances, rather than exerting any will on events. He passively submits to events as they arise, changing directions as the moment suits him. He takes an apartment he reads about in a Yiddish newspaper in order to fill a few hours before a meeting. When, furious and suspicious, he visits the swindler, Reyzl, to demand back his passport (she is supposedly having a forger duplicate the passport with her name), he ends up in bed with her because she suggests it, as a means of subduing him. Max suggests to a medium, as she pours out her troubles to him over some herring in a cafe, that she become his lover and return with him to Argentina, where he will set her up. The words come out of his mouth without any deliberation: "This is actually the opposite of my entire plan, Max thought. I'm turning everything upside down" (200). The fact is Max has no plan. He intends to visit his parents' gravesite but never does. He proposes a marriage to Tsirele that, with a wife at home, could never happen. He makes vows to himself on the spur of the moment, as the new obsession seems like a more workable solution than the one he has become dissatisfied with as it loses its appeal. He allows himself to be taken in by Reyzl's scheme to set up a prostitution ring in Argentina, as her suggestion alleviates the aimlessness of his own plans at that juncture. Max does have a conscience, however. "As corrupt as he was, hidden somewhere in him there was an honest man, a moralizer who terrorized him with thoughts of the day of death and the hell to come" (89). So his angst, ultimately, results from his own inability to make ethical choices. He even hears his mother's voice at one point: "A person is his own worst enemy....Ten enemies can't do what a person does to himself" (106). And he suffers terrible fear at the curse (taken from the Torah) Tsirele damns him with on his revealing to her that he has deceived her: "Cursed may you be! Cursed forever! You shall have no peace in this world or in the grave" (174). While he is capable of hearing the voices in his psyche that encourage a more responsible behavior, he fails utterly to listen in his treading away towards action he believes will distract him from the necessity of giving in. Max's mistake is in thinking that he must continuously rage against those forces of submission. His whole behavior is motivated by a refusal to submit to his place on Earth. If he has given up God and religious guidelines, then the quest is to find goodness in his own behavior. He makes a bad job of it. His author was able to satisfy the need for establishing values by creating in his writing a universe in which more balance could be expressed. If I.B. Singer's universe is vague in its demands for a presentable mode of behavior, it is highly pleasing to experience in its comfortable familiarity, its honesty in reflecting back the actuality of our living. There is no attempt to disguise the way we are supposed to be, no pretense of characters behaving in ideal ways to be symbols of goodness for us to strive to emulate, or vile villains so rotten we obviously despise them and expect to see them eliminated for the just cause. Singer's genius is in depicting the struggle we all share in owning qualities of both destruction and creativity. Faced with choices, our task is to move with an understanding of the interference we are bound to experience from our own fallibilities. Singer's characters, so lovingly presented, announce that susceptibility on every page. Yearning seethes through every line he wrote — a desire for relief, for more gratification. His most interesting characters are complainers; they are not satisfied with what they have. They strive to obtain more, whether it is expressed as the urge to possess a lover or a desire for more enlightenment, more contentment, less grief. Throughout his work there is a refusal to be satisfied, a refusal to accept the circumstances of life as they have been dealt out. There is a vitality, a strength and a courage that permeates, that drives, that agitates, that campaigns for new reckonings, that wishes to argue with God in order to not passively submit. Max Barabander strays farther from ethical behavior than any of Singer's previous characters. While doubts and anxieties have always been a pressing feature of Singer's work, he always dealt with those problems with a balancing dose of good humor, an amusement at the challenges, in their universal commonness. Since suffering is something we all share and can identify with, in his writing Singer emphasized the strength of his characters in meeting their particular hardships. Most often characters find the necessary strength to see them through in their passions for their mates. As long as that energy flows, a character is fused with the grounding to stay connected. Max is floating in the universe untethered to any attachment on Earth and disconnected from God. It seems as if Singer's hope for humanity was becoming bleaker at this late stage in his career. But Max's actions are a clear warning of the dangers we face. Singer does not present a solution or allow Max an alternative plan. In his depiction of Max's waywardness is an obvious display of how not to behave. Singer leaves it up to us as individuals to discover our own route. He knows that no moral tale can be effective with a false resolution of redemption. The choice is ours, he indicates. Chapter 3 |