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Chapter Three Sam Girgus, looking at Singer's tales of the shtetl, comments that Singer sets up a war in which even the pre-modern villages must participate, a war of the will against the temptations of the Devil and the woman as demon. Girgus makes the interesting distinction that while the Devil acts on a level with which we are familiar, that "operates from a position within the psychological and religious structure of the culture...[t]he demon woman, in contrast, is the outsider, more dangerous by far because she questions the validity of all aspects of a patriarchal society's assumptions" (132). In other words, the Devil figure — which frequently appears in Singer's writing as a demon, imp, or dybbuk, to challenge or haunt a conscience — we recognize from popular tradition as a temptation to do evil. But Singer's demon woman is a development that secularizes morality by locating the struggle in tones more earthly and sexual. Since the woman in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish life had no social status and no power or authority, her presence, Girgus points out, threatened a deep-seated, unconscious fear that dwells within the structure of "male social, cultural and religious hierarchy" (133). There is an implication that the struggle with the Devil affirms and reinforces the religious order. The demon woman, however, is a more complicated force, whose terror arises from the fact that she does not conform to traditional models of temptation or conflict between good and evil. Comparing Singer's use of demon women to similar figures in Victorian art — Lilith, Vivien, Faustine, Salome — Girgus says women have taken over from religious models that have lost credibility. This development could surely also be seen as misogyny. The patriarchal society, with religious stereotypes losing their influence, finds a new structure to preserve its mastery: creating a tainted female type calculated to instill fear of the entire gender. The demon woman has been assigned those mysterious terrors formerly held by divinity. In the story "The Destruction of Kreshev," a young woman about to be married is given this send-off by her mother: "Mazel tov, daughter. You are now a woman and share with us all the curses of Eve" (Collected 108). The message, as Girgus points out, accurately embodies the attitudes a young woman is required to swallow in order to take her place in a subsidiary role. The mother's transference is typical of the stereotype the female role is assigned. As the virgin leaves her first home, the mother, complicit in society's denigration of women, instructs her daughter to fulfill her function as a vessel, offering no alternative situation or any hope for individual fulfillment. She is consigning control of her daughter from the daughter's father to the new man in her life, letting the daughter know that she is expected to submit to this transfer of authority over her will (Girgus 143). It is when this young woman, Lise, takes a lover that she becomes abhorrent to the community. Her husband, who in his perversity caused Lise to transgress the marriage bind, is accepted back into the community once he asks forgiveness of his fellows in the synagogue. But Lise, who has escaped the hypocrisy of her husband's teachings and become attached to Mendele, a coachman, must suffer for her audacity in making an independent decision. While Mendele is persecuted and punished in a traditional manner that includes forgiveness, Lise is transformed by the entire village — women and men — into something despicable. Having acted on her own is an affront the village cannot make sense of, in their obedience to patriarchal boundaries that forbid just that. Girgus sees this process as the town's effort to deny the fears of sexuality that this episode stirs up for them. Rather than allow for behavior that moves beyond strict protocols, the community can project on Lise all their own fears and prejudices, blaming and castigating her for defying conventions (144). Lise refuses to submit to their need for her to explain her actions in terms they can understand. She would have to admit guilt and betrayal of a man. The community is perplexed; this does not fit into models they can control. Lise troubles the town because she does not fit a category with which they are familiar. She is not dismissible as a harlot or easily definable as a witch. Instead, as Girgus points out, she "fulfills the role of the demon woman who inspires significant turmoil and change" (146). The fact that Lise will not relinquish her femininity is upsetting to the town. She will not be restrained by the limitations the townspeople would consign to her. This audacity is a show of power that is dangerous to the standards by which these people govern themselves. It questions the assumptions behind the positions of power and governance. A group of women in the village's Burial Society take it upon themselves to discredit Lise and to shame her by placing a pudding pot on her head, hanging a necklace of garlic and a dead goose around her neck, and girdling her loins with a rope of straw. The community batters her with slops and chicken entrails in their anger and hatred of the unfamiliar and transgressive of repressive laws. Lise ends up hanging herself. Rather than champion the rights of the woman, Singer, in the story's finale, while outwardly seeming to condemn the actions of the community, instead supports its structure by associating Lise with witches: "That night a gale blew as if (as the saying goes) seven witches had hanged themselves. Actually only one young woman hanged herself — Lise" (Collected 127). As a final rejection, Lise is refused burial in the family plot and consigned to a patch outside the cemetery's fence with the other suicides. While the villagers' hysteria and irrational activity — on psychological and action levels — is judged by Singer to be unfair, Lise has been transformed by the mob into a problem that does not come from outside the culture in the form of Devils or demons who simply create mischief. She exemplifies a condition that exists within the society, of the woman victimized by patriarchal authority. The tragedy here is not Lise's failure to conform to her society's behavior but the society's failure to tolerate an individual's right to differ. As a further example of this prejudice, in Singer's novel The Slave the character Wanda is denied acceptance first by the man she loves and ultimately by the community because she is not Jewish. When her religious feelings and her conversion fail to win her re-admission and she dies, the strength of her faith persists as she comes to women in dreams, and some villagers perceive an apparition of her when the house she died in burns down. Similarly, in the story "Diary of One Not Born" a respectable woman is disregarded by townspeople when a spirit betrays her. Though a stranger to the town, the male demon's word is heard without doubt while the woman's, a woman who has lived among them for years, is discounted. The point of the story is to show how evil can infect even the most innocent and undeserving. Yet this aspect, of a woman victimized and undefended, isolated and her needs unconsidered, is disturbing. She ends up throwing herself down a well to spite "God, the town and her own bad luck" (Gimpel 181). If she'd had one person who believed her, one person considerate enough to listen to her side, alternatives might have been possible. But giving credence to a woman's side of the story is not a consideration. "Women have been given nine measures of garrulousness and only half a measure of faith" (Gimpel 171), Singer says earlier in the story, as if with the use of an old saying he could dismiss the rights of his women characters from consideration Girgus ultimately does find some benefit from the feminine element as a necessary and sustaining act of creation, seeing the demon woman as an agent for constructive change. By confronting behaviors held in place by tradition, he says, this feminine influence necessitates a reassessment (150). Sarah Blacher Cohen also recognizes this treatment of women as a species in Singer. While she acknowledges that women in his writing offer something comforting and familiar, validating the male protagonists' expectations of this life, there is also something sinister going on in the way Singer ascribes to his females "symbolic powers" that jar his males' expectations. Men are often transported and disoriented by their encounters or involvements with women, whom they can then blame for this loss of reasoning. It is common for a Singer protagonist to have several female lovers, such as occurs in Enemies, A Love Story, Shosha, Scum, and The Certificate. This availability is not limited to the males. Many of his females — indeed, some of his strongest women characters — have several lovers, also. But the reader's point of view is always from the male perspective. If a woman has more than one lover, the implication is that she seeks fulfillment from as many sources as possible. We are induced to sympathize with male narrators as they reach for answers to life's enigmas, with women being rungs on a ladder to that just-out-of-reach salvation. Women are used as comfort niches, comfortable in their accessibility, as men yearn for a more fulfilling end to their anxiety. The men who cannot accept the status quo are not content with the way things are. They are destroyers of the momentary peace in their compulsion to attain more and ever more. They are imbued with an assumption that they can take possession of anything or anyone who would serve his purpose. Herman Broder, in Enemies, A Love Story, for example, has three female lovers, each of whom fulfills particular needs. Perhaps it's not fair to single out Singer for a compulsion that has been commonly accepted for a long time. A compulsion that might, in fact, define maleness in Western culture beginning with the Bible's patriarchal systems smiting everything in sight. In The Odyssey, the foundation of Western literature, Odysseus departs from the fundamental agreement between humankind and nature, and goes off, forced to fight his way back home, but is portrayed as heroic for his triumphs in conquering many realms. This is a familiar value system that permeates our culture, fostered by a dominating male authority, one who has assigned himself the privilege of imposing his will on his surroundings; one who is so unsure of his own self, that he must control and possess as much of others as he can, to reassure himself that he is, at least, powerful enough to dominate someone else. In other words, Singer's males look outward, towards women, instead of inward, for their fulfillment. In avoiding the issue of self-knowing, they distract themselves with female lovers — there are no homosexual liaisons in Singer — in their attempt to satiate themselves with externals. This strategy does not work, of course. It pacifies and comforts, as drugs will, but the emptiness remains at the core of their beings. This emptiness used to be dealt with by insisting on a fervid attachment to, and complete immersion in, the teachings of the sacred books, and an unrelenting adherence to the daily and periodic rituals of the faith. This behavior worked to keep the Jews as a people together for thousands of years, despite exile, persecution, and no native state. Almost from the beginning of their organization as a faith, Jews' impassioned obedience to their laws in the face of constant outside interference kept them together as a tribe, and encouraged the survival instinct. Isolated in the shtetls, the peasantry were presented with no options until the end of the nineteenth century, when the railroad brought the enrichments and temptations of secular civilization too close to stay for the shtetls to stay unaffected. Singer's story "Reb Itchele and Shprintza" is one of those small pieces that come into being not so much for the telling of a tale as for an opportunity to describe and evoke the sense of loveliness Singer felt amidst his surroundings in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw and that he so obviously loves returning to in his writing. Despite wretchedness and earthly distractions, one comes away from this story with a sense that there is a balance and an orderliness provided by the ancient Jewish customs. As long as the Sabbath observances are kept, and as long as men continue to pray and read the holy books all day in the study house, then the interferences brought on by worldly needs have be consigned to a low priority, and the focus on maintaining the decorum of ritual behavior can remain rigidly in place. This story, in spite of Singer's obvious allegiance to and high regard for that system, allows some of the cracks to show. The narrative structure depends on the young Isaac fulfilling his weekly Sabbath chore of fetching the hot water necessary for his family's tea from a couple in the neighborhood — Reb Itchele and Shprintza — who have kept a kettle warm all through the Sabbath. Sabbath injunctions against cooking on the week's holiest day make it necessary for observant families to buy their tea water on credit (since carrying money on the Sabbath is also forbidden) from this family, who heat up water the day before and keep it warm on the stove. Around this simple chore, Singer composes his rhapsodic profile and rich description of the surroundings, to offer a tableaux that reverberates with physical intimacy and a welcome-in acquaintance with his characters and their environment. Reb Itchele ("reb" is a designation of respect for a wise man) and his wife Shprintza run a grocery store at 15 Krochmalna Street. That is, while her husband is at the study house all day, Shprintza minds the business, keeping one eye on the "customer who was sloshing her hand about in the brine, trying to pick out a herring from the bottom of the barrel, and with the other eye, boys who liked to play with the beans in the sacks" (Pleasure 112). Singer goes beyond a mere physical description of her to offer us more than what the eye can discern. He depicts the state of her soul by detailing the righteousness of her intentions. For Singer, Shprintza is a noble woman because: "Her life was dedicated to the highest of all tasks, that of supporting her family and — to the extent she could — Jewishness and the study of the Torah" (Pleasure 112). Similarly, in the story "Who I Am," from the same collection: "Our house was a house of learning. My father sat all day long and studied the Talmud. Whenever my mother had a free minute, she glanced into a holy book" (Pleasure 6). Singer has no problem with this situation. For him, things are working and things are at peace. He see a balance here. The woman is ennobled and exalted because she sacrifices her own desires, to enable her husband in his pursuit of the holy works. Singer does not even acknowledge that there is a sacrifice here. It is enough for him to let her continue what she is doing, as it supports his male's purpose. The fissure that Singer does acknowledge in this system happens with Itchele and Shprintza's two sons, who have no desire to follow their father's prototype and continue the pattern. While their father attempts to engage them in debates on what their course of action should be, quoting from the holy books as his reliable witness, the sons couldn't care less. They brush him off with barely disguised contempt, in order to get out of the house and engage in activities they are excited about, such as playing with "buttons decorated with crowns and eagles" and hanging "around the fellows who took girls to moving pictures" (Pleasure 116). Singer, like a journalist admitted entry to private quarters, is here, as a young boy, given access to family intimacies. After this scene, as a sort of cadenza to what we have just been given, the young Isaac encounters Reb Mein the Eunuch on the street. This is a man who for half of every month is a babbling, deranged person. For the other half he "poured forth wisdom, quotations from the Torah, Hasidic witticisms, tales of Wonder Rabbis" (Pleasure 118). Seeing through Singer's eyes how this unfortunate semi-helpless man is tolerated, even venerated, in the community yields an idyllic picture of a locale getting along in harmony. We find out it is "some merciful woman" who takes care of this person. Somebody is being put out to aid this man incapable of survival on his own. This is how families and communities survive, but it seems to be women suffering the burden of the care-giving here. But for Singer, the sacrifices must be made for the vital necessity of maintaining Jewishness, at whatever cost. This story ends on a trumpeting of indulgence, pointing out that despite the foibles and peculiarities of members of the community, they are all saved in their primal identification as Jews. Speaking of Reb Meir the Eunuch heading home for the Sabbath rituals, Singer concludes: "Eunuch or not, sane or insane, a Jew is a Jew" (Pleasure 119). Evelyn Torton Beck points out the damaging effects of Singer's stereotyping of women in her call to be more critical of literary texts. She warns that if we let these assumptions go by without being alert to their implications, then we are accessories, and validate the "status quo which always reinforces the worst prejudices of a society" (122). She emphasizes how important it is for the reader to be conscious of stereotyping in texts, and how insidious this could be because of its prevalence. The effect of stereotyping, she states, is a control mechanism to keep groups "in inferior positions, be they Jews in a Gentile society, Yiddish in Jewish culture, or women in a patriarchy" (122). Those stereotypes begin with the traditional ascription to women and men of characteristics that set up the genders in opposition: women are basically nurturing, emotional, sensual, and practical, while men are abstract, intellectual, creative, and worldly. This division is not created to assign complementary functions but rather to create a "power relationship whereby one group is controlled by another" (113). Singer is willing to listen to generalizations that suit his inclination. Listen to this declaration from Meshugah: "I had been raised on the old views of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Otto Weininger that women had no sense of time or logic and were always guided by their emotions" (139). Not satisfied with recognizing what she calls Singer's "basically conservative stance" in regards to women's subservient position, Beck perceives a "deep mistrust, revulsion and hostility toward women, especially those who in any way stray from their prescribed roles or cease to organize their lives around men" (115). It is Singer's male-centered vision that annoys Beck, the perspective of the colonialist who can view only in terms of me and other, the implication being that "other" is lesser. Strong females in Singer's work inevitably stumble and end up suffering for their assertiveness. Yentl, perhaps his most famous character, illustrates this point. First, her femininity is insulted by her father who, recognizing her intelligence, ascribes that attribute to some divine flaw: "Yentl — you have the soul of a man" (Collected 149). Desiring to transcend the typical roles her society would force upon her, Yentl defies the conventions — necessitating her disguising herself as a male — to study and to seek wisdom. Although the author apparently has sympathy for his creation, Beck sees that "in the end, her inclination to study in preference to mending socks is presented as if it were a kind of failing in her" (116). Women's sexuality is a threat to Singer. His male characters are continually fortifying themselves against it, projecting all their fears onto the female. Women are consistently described and rated physically; a high bosom rates high. He cannot see past women's bodies, Beck asserts, which subsumes the way he is available to perception. It forces him to regard females not as individuals but as members of a species to which he can ascribe whatever shortcomings he perceives in its failure to provide for him. Projecting his own "stuff" onto female characters, he is persistently imbuing them with sexual appetites that imply a swallowing of the male, as if the male were helpless faced with these circumstances. Another result of Singer's overemphasis on women's sexuality is, Beck says, a hostility towards it. Men who become aroused and are incapable of dealing with their feelings in a healthy way repress their feelings, which must then become convoluted to the point of perversity and violence toward women, the object perceived as unattainable and so to blame. In the story "Under the Knife" a male fantasizes his grisly murder of the woman who has rejected him. Fantasy becomes real in Scum, where the protagonist Max Barabander gruesomely murders the woman who has outmaneuvered him. Beck points to several examples of Singer associating women with a plethora of negative characteristics. She sees women associated with negative characteristics so often in Singer's work that she feels they "virtually form a single narrative thread" (119). Pejorative remarks are dropped so casually into Singer's stories, Beck says, that it can be assumed that any feminine connotation implies something tainted. His problem, Beck states, is that ultimately he cannot see women as individuals, only as types. Since types in fiction are modeled on characteristics already shrunk into an identifiable stereotype, these literary creations have a great deal of power in promulgating those simplistic and narrow generalizations. Singer is not afraid to be blatant about it. From Meshugah: "Deep inside I doubted I would ever give my name to Miriam. Old-fashioned masculine pride still breathed in me, the kind which separated a mistress from a wife, an affair from a marriage" (142). Singer might be defended by resorting to the fact that this is a fictional creation uttering these words, that he in fact was married to the same woman for a long time. But it seems a thinly veiled disguise. Beck recognizes specific types of women in his writing: the witch, the shrew, and woman as passive victim. The familiarity of these pigeonholed types moves Beck to see beyond their standing in as symbolic representations by male writers. These identities are not merely projections that reinforce prejudices. These characters, even as they are artificial, carry a great deal of authority as printed, set down archetypes. As a text, they are responsible for projecting an attitude that readers, both male and female, are very susceptible to internalizing. Singer's women characters become models of behavior (121). The only successful women Beck observes in Singer's work are a few women who accept their prescribed subsidiary situation and devote themselves to supporting men, at the expense of caring for their own needs and development. The men, she recognizes, also seem bound to prescribed roles, but while the men are driven to serve God, the women serve men (121). An alternative perspective on these issues is available to us, Rashomon-like, in Deborah, a novel written in 1936 by I.B. Singer's sister, Esther Kreitman. The opening pages of this novel explode with the point of view we are not given in Singer's works. The setting and characters are very familiar to us from our reading of Singer's work; yet there is one major difference: the woman's voice and inner thoughts are heard. And it is a complaint and a tremendous frustration at being excluded, feeling imprisoned in a system that denigrates her for being female. It is no surprise that once allowed to speak, a woman of this era complains of the position she has been assigned. In Singer's work this problem is avoided simply by not asking women what they think. As the book opens, the fourteen-year-old narrator, Deborah, is shown to be painfully aware of her present exclusion, and denied hope that things might improve in the future. Upon hearing her father praise her younger brother for his accomplishments in studying the Talmud, she asks him what she can expect of her future. He replies, "What are you going to be one day? Nothing, of course!" (6) While Singer paints his loving portraits of the townsfolk, Kreitman's contempt and her sense of exclusion are evident in this loaded sentence from her description of the excitement of market day in Jelhitz (Bilgoray): "None of the menfolk idled their time away in the warmth of the synagogue, relating strange tales of events in the unknown beyond" (9) The entirety of the long novel is permeated with the narrator's anguish and suffering. As a child she is denied access to education, despite her eagerness to learn. Once the family moves to Warsaw, she has hopes that at last in the city she will be afforded some opportunities. But she spends her first three weeks there trapped inside the apartment because she doesn't have a hat to wear and she has been told it would be improper for her to stroll without one. At last she meets some intelligent people who are dedicated to the socialist cause. Unfortunately, though dedicated to world change, Deborah's closest associates in the secret organization are all too human in their emotional dealings with her. She is denied access to this movement because its leader, Simon, afraid of his unannounced love for her, shuns her and forbids her to do the work she is so qualified to do. In desperation, she accepts her family's machinations for an arranged marriage. Arranged marriages were not unusual at the time; nonetheless Deborah has spurned this ritual several times before. By this point in the narrative, however, she has despaired at her isolation and sees this arrangement as a means of escape. She has nothing, and at least this, as distasteful as it is to her, offers some hope; but it doesn't work out. She finds her husband's presence almost unbearable. The marriage seems to remain unconsummated in the year of marriage chronicled in the book. The dowry money promised by the groom's father never arrives. The husband's occupation as diamond-cutter fails to provide for their needs, as the business all through Antwerp, where they've settled, is in a depressed state. Through all this, Deborah keeps her thoughts and feelings to herself. The book is a litany of her frustrations at having no confidant, no outlet for her inner world, no way to express herself, no opportunity to fulfill herself. She remains disregarded, and is given no value by others except as a barter item in the arranged marriage. She is made to think of herself as a "useless ornament" (248). At the two key moments in the novel when she can contain herself no longer, and releases her pent-up emotions, the response is entirely unsatisfying. Simon responds to her unburdening with an automaton's cool detachment. When she confesses to her husband that she has no feeling for him because she retains her fantasy of an intimacy with Simon, the husband is fascinated with this new element of passion in his wife. He's so flattered that she's being direct with him that he entirely misses the message of what he is hearing. As if all this suffering is not enough, Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated in distant Sarajevo, and the effects of war begin to wedge their terrors into the fabric of daily life. The book is sad; there's no happy ending, no escape for Deborah. Even a dream at the end of the novel concludes badly. Deborah, in her dream, manages to escape her poverty and starvation in Belgium and travels back to Warsaw. When she gets back to her parent's home, it is in the process of being renovated, the rooms are empty, and her parents are gone. No one can direct her to where they've relocated. She wakes up to her bleak reality and the novel ends. The book gives us a marvelous sense of the ordinary reality of this character, more remarkable for its autobiographical candor. Its complaint is unfiltered by the author, and there's little regard for audience endurance. The extremity of its message seems beyond the touch of humor her brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer, would infuse into the telling. The suffering is so heavy, the degree of isolation so serious, that Kreitman has no desire to distance herself from the material with an author's privilege of irony. The weight of the events and the author's response to them can only be addressed within the pages of the novel. As a woman she lacks the opportunity to initiate direct action. This reality crushes her to the point that she stops trying. Her only recourse is to write her experience for an unknown audience. The biographical note mentions that Esther Kreitman destroyed a bundle of early writing prior to her actual arranged marriage. It was as if the personal expression could threaten the future possibilities of her new position. She was expected to express little of her own needs, and accept her situation as an accoutrement and support to her husband. In this way, she and her fictive self, Deborah, are victims of society's denigration. She has been forced to accept a role she finds distasteful because the options available to her are even more limiting. Forced to marginal servitude, disregarded, poorly considered, and with no support coming from family or friends, she is forced to rely on her own will and to depend on her own sense of exclusion. She is not capable of bearing up to the task with any sense of good humor that might make her more palatable and acceptable to her audience. She is outraged and alone. Her brother could afford humor in his writing because he had the privilege as a male of being more acceptable and more well-considered. He starts from a place where his concerns are going to be addressed. Esther/Deborah, who started her life with a shove into shadow, has emerged only long enough to cry out at the depravity of her situation and to make visible the problems so they can be noticed. If she fails at winning consideration for a place setting, this unhappy novel stands as evidence of her plight. As a complement to the work of her younger brother, Isaac Bashevis, it fills in a lot of the unheard-from voices. It is enriching for permitting us to see from a different perspective, one that shows us that there are more than two sides to every story. Chapter 4 |