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Chapter Four For all their anxiety and for all their meditation on why are we here, Singer's characters offer a measure of hope in their seeking, in their passion to discover deeper meaning and to not be satisfied with their present circumstances or current awareness. If an ultimate meaning is not forthcoming — a solution that would answer questions and satisfy skeptics — it is those characters who search for one that display an aliveness in the face of what might otherwise condemn one to defeat. Singer's authorial bemusement at his character's plight and sympathetic regard for their predicament is how he manifests hope. Humor is not a weapon used adversely to conquer a foe but a strategy to make it unnecessary to conquer. With humor one looks at a situation and sees absurdity in affecting so much change, as if one person had the right to more than a fair share. Singer's humor is in the service of a humble order that recognizes human limitations and mocks those who might show the arrogance to rise from their situation. There is more than a hint of defeatism in this attitude. There is a slave mentality in operation, a lack of expectation of liberation, an acceptance of limitations. He speaks from within a captivity. All the will power he calls on is not enough to convince him that his plight is surmountable. Singer creates characters who struggle to find meaning in their exile (from the old country and from God) but who are chained to those oppressive systems which demand loyalty. There is always plenty of humor to soothe the plight. This makes the work appealing as the difficulties are seen to inspire a sense of amusement where otherwise there could as easily be the sense of tragedy at the failure to surmount. There is a problem here. Humor in the face of adversity is certainly an admirable trait and one that can be said to show a great deal of wisdom in seeing oneself in the larger context. But if one regards it as a symptom of an unwillingness to expect satisfaction, we can begin to look at it as the attitude of a person with little expectation. The Jews as a minority people have always been oppressed. Humor might be seen as a method the weaker party developed to get along with the stronger. Humor was a way the Jew could pacify the bully, or even justify to themselves an inability to escape an oppressor's clutches. A people that developed such a rich level of culture might be said to have been driven to that achievement by a desperate need to vent in a theatrical way what they could not express politically (until the Zionist movement resulted in the state of Israel). Rabbi Joseph Telushkin validates this point saying: "Anything that can be mocked immediately seems less threatening. The greater the anxiety a particular subject produces, the more jokes will be made about it" (17). Seems less threatening. The humor works to create an illusion that things are not quite what they seem but the reality is unchanged, only the perception or response to it is altered for the moment. This joke, which Telushkin tells, illustrates how a Jew, faced with a stronger adversary, can survive by cunning: A small Jewish man is sitting on a boat deck next to a huge, sleeping Texan. The Jew gets seasick and ends up vomiting all over the Texan.Rabbi Telushkin, and a rabbi's son, the comic Jackie Mason in his book How to Talk Jewish, both point to the fact that Jews have used humor as an escape for as long as they have been organized as a people. "Jews knew," Mason says: that things were so stacked against them by the countries in which they were living that the only sure way they could never win a fight was by fighting. So they had to find ways of winning the fight by avoiding it, outsmarting their opponent, outmaneuvering him, coddling him, lying to him, hiding from him. Anything except fighting, because he was so out-numbered, so outmanned, so outarmed....In such circumstances, humor always helped give the Jew perspective and a sense of balance. Humor is a way to maintain your equilibrium in the face of misery...It's basically the avoidance of reality. It's a way of creating a different world for yourself... (7-8)It is not just against territorial boundaries the Jews fight but against hope for the future. Their religion promises a future paradise once the Messiah arrives, yet their experience all through history has been a series of slavery, pogroms, expulsion, and Holocaust. This disparity has given rise to their sense of humor, according to Telushkin, as a means of compelling them through the hard times, a means of coping without surrendering to defeat. Telushkin finds the foundation for this approach in the Bible and other Jewish holy works where complaining to God gives rise to a spirit of verbal sparring. The disparity between the reality the Jews are promised and the imperfections they must live with "engendered just the sort of skepticism in which humor flourishes" (149). The humor Singer employs is a coping mechanism. There is a distinction to be made between coping and surmounting. Coping implies dealing with something as best one can. It implies an acceptance of the condition one finds oneself in. It is an active state in that one is creating with the materials available but it is passive in that the materials are drawn from familiar grounds. There is an incestuous relationship in that the humor is geared to an audience that will recognize all the referents and so complexities must be reduced into stereotypical situations. It is meant to please an audience who will find solace in sharing their pitiable situation, in recognizing that their exile, their state of confusion or denigration, is shared by their peers. Their pain is thus alleviated through a transference of personal isolation to their like-situated clanspersons. In other words, the humor implies an unwillingness to get involved in the affairs of state, including the eternal state, with the sense that power can be wrestled away from those currently holding the reins, whether that be the God of Abraham or the czar. At the same time as the Jew has been preserved and sustained by an obedience to their books, they have also been crippled into accepting an ideology that demands obedience and forbids even the audacity of questioning authority in any way that demands change. Joseph Boskin examines how the Jews and African-Americans in American society developed humor along similar lines as a weapon against oppression and domination by a majority culture. Citing Freud's remarks in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, that "all humor serves an aggressive intent, that all joking is tendentious," Boskin shows how humor is wielded to circumvent obstacles and to make "our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic" as a means to achieving "in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him" (Freud, quoted in Boskin, 55). But is this an overcoming? Isn't it more a coping, a dealing as best one can in the face of a powerful, potentially death-dealing adversary? Boskin sees weaponry in the aggressive humor both Jews and African-Americans have developed to protest the limitations society has imposed on them and, with stereotyping, has used persistently in the attempt to suppress them. But the act of humorizing the situation is an act of salvation only within the peer group. It is imperative for the individual to "maintain an elevated morale, a sense of dignity, and a feeling of power" (55). The development of humor is a means of not being denigrated nor of internalizing the bullying foe's attempt at stereotyping as a method of wielding offensive power. Boskin sees the language of retaliatory humor as a form of magic that both Jews and African-Americans have been forced to resort to in their inability to deal physically with discriminatory practices. "If your enemy is laughing," Mel Brooks is quoted as saying, "how can he bludgeon you to death?" (in Boskin 61). Robert Alter agrees, stressing: "In such circumstances...a shrewdly ironic humor became a source of necessary inner strength, a mode of survival" (25). Alter looks at the strategy of self-mockery as possessing a hope for a better future. He discusses the European cultural tradition as having formulated suffering as a mystery — beginning with Greek tragedies and continuing with Christ's passion — and posits affliction as the test through which we may realize our humanity. The distinction Jewish humor makes is to ground the suffering to a localized, more directly experienced pain rather than an annoyance at cosmic riddles. Alter sees Jewish writing characterized by a folk imagination that narrates personably as opposed to an impersonally conveyed story. The "narrator sane enough to be funny in a mad world," he says, is "a way of hanging on to lucidity" (35). He then goes on to contrast the attempt to reorder the sense (dereglement de tous les sens) of modern writers like Rimbaud to the Jewish tradition which would hang on to a legacy of sticking with the familiar, even in the face of "modern" crises issued by unprecedented situations. If disaster, whatever the scale, seems to be our general fate, the persistence of the comic reflex is itself evidence of the perdurability of the stuff of humanity: a shrug is a small and subtle gesture, but in the face of the harshest history, it may take a world of strength to make. (35-36)Perhaps we can also see this tendency to retreat to comforting familiarities in the face of oppression or difficult circumstances as a conservation of values and traditions at the expense of progressing to a more evolved state. It is one thing to shrug off the aggression of a bully with a recognition that tomorrow, perhaps, that bully will not be around. That stance assumes a lot of protection from abstract providers — God, fate, human behavior. It lacks direct responsibility, an engagement that believes that step-by-step I can build something or change my circumstance. Dan Miron makes the case that the tradition of Yiddish story-telling depends on the point of view of Jewish passivity: men and women in the gravest danger who experience terrible trials and are unable to envision a way of extricating themselves from their hellish situation, other than the act embodied in the telling of their tribulations in rich and digressive speech... (Miron 10). He then recognizes in Singer's words the voice of a person located within self-conscious boundaries: In Bashevis' monologues the flow of speech is the tempestuous or relaxed flow of the human soul that is carried upon the waves of a current over which it has no control. The demons, great and small, that often make their voices heard in these monologues, are none other than expressions of the speaker's awareness that his or her attempt to fight the current will not end successfully. (10)Miron emphasizes how Singer, even as early as his first novel, diverting from his predecessor's style of a rococo sentence structure that indicated a nervousness, relaxes his sentence to a "basic, epic simplicity" (16). Singer's purpose in doing this, Miron states, is to prioritize the story being related over the necessity of an emotional expressionistic editorializing. The story, the basic tale, is primary because the action of a story, and its recounting, is as much as can be done in a universe where external forces might crush you at any moment. Passivity is an attitude, Miron says, that is a response to Singer's witnessing what he (Singer) interprets as a futility in oppossing those external forces. There is something a bit disconcerting about our willingness to agree with this position which frees us from any responsibility for decisive action. Singer's enormous popularity and the magnetic appeal of his work can be said to rely, to a great degree at least, on this offer to free us from any social obligation to better our condition. There is a sweet seductiveness in his call to passivity. Beware of false messiahs, do not put your hopes in a social movement. They will all prove to be much less than you wish them to be, he is saying repeatedly. Miron goes even further in asking whether Singer's appeal to non-Jews might be based on this non-threatening position. Certainly, a non-Jew would be comfortable with a set of Singer's Jewish characters who offer no aggression to their turf and who wallow in their own doubts and vagaries, making messes of their lives as they, and as Singer, wander "through strange and wild experiences and events — all of them out of the realm of his control" (17). When Singer's two old men at the end of Shosha exclaim, "We're waiting for an answer...," as they sit in a darkened room, the implication is that despite all one goes through in life, all the experience one gains and all the pain one suffers, the most that can be expected is an outside provider to come redeem what has been an enigmatic existence. There is hope expressed here but it is a fool's hope, it is a delusion and a giving away personal responsibility to a superstitious faith that a messiah, or some system of God or Godot, will come to take care of the unanswered questions and unprovided for needs. This reflection from Meshugah illustrates the passive stance Singer wields as his anti-weapon: This world is not our world, we did not create it, we are powerless to change it. The Higher Powers gave us but one gift: choice, the freedom to choose between one woe and another, between one illusion and another. My advice was, Do nothing. I even made up my own motto: "Nothing is as good as nothing." (180-81)The character of the schlemiel (fool or simpleton) arose in Yiddish literature because the type illustrated the absurd conditions the Jews found themselves situated in — that of a rational people faced with the irrational activities of a harsh world. The shlemiel, in his naive response to a world which could obliterate him, defines for us as readers a possiblility of hope over what might otherwise be a despairing situation. He's the figure in the battlefield, Ruth R. Wisse points out, who cries "Stop shooting! Someone might, God forbid, lose an eye!" (Schlemiel 23). Wisse finds the schlemiel archetype originating in the tale of Purim where the character Fastrigossa, though a poor young tailor, has illusions of wedding Esther, who becomes Queen. It picks up some characteristics from fifteenth-century German stories which had characters named Hans Wurst and Pickelherring. In the nineteenth century, this figure became prominent in the writings of many of the Yiddish writers who were attempting to reach a wide audience among the large Jewish population. These writers, the most cited being Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, were affected by the social-political movement called Haskalah which continued the empowering of the Jews following emancipation in France and Germany. The Haskilim pushed for reform, educational and political, which would tear the shtetl mentality out of its isolation and bring it more into the current flow. They wanted the Jews to give up their traditional garb, the long kapote, in favor of Western dress. They wanted instruction in the local languages and establishment of trade schools. Unfortunately for these satirist writers, Wisse goes on, the increasing oppression of the Czars made their moral tales inappropriate and unfulfilling for their people as the social reform their writing called for can only apply to a people who have some power to affect their destiny. The Haskalah ideal, based on rational assumptions that education and more interaction with the host nations would improve conditions for the Jews, was thwarted by the irrational prejudice of increasingly threatening anti-Semitism. Trust in reason was undermined. As the pogroms were becoming worse in the 1880s, the writer Sholem Aleichem was criticized by some of his Jewish readers for writing humorous stories. His stories assume a pessimism that things cannot get better so one might as well laugh. Quoting Maurice Samuel, Wisse emphasizes that there is more going on than a "therapeutic resistance to the destructive frustrations and humiliations of the Exile" (Samuel, quoted in Schlemiel 44). It was an act of denial and sublimation. Humor was not merely a trick whereby disaster was changed into "a verbal triumph, applying a sort of Talmudic ingenuity of interpretation to events they could not handle in their reality" (44). Though the condition of their physical disadvantage is not altered, dialectically they emerge with a sense of triumph. Isaac Bashevis Singer carries on this tradition of the naive simpleton struggling against seemingly insurmountable odds even after the Holocaust has proved the dangers of such a failure to act. The schlemiel survives by not wanting any part of the truth the bigger world tries to impose on him. He becomes a hero, Wisse says, by not wanting to be a hero. Transplanting the "heroic non-hero" to America, Singer's version of the schlemiel develops his characteristics to reflect more of an integration — and resistance — into "modern" conditions. His character Gimpel the Fool narrates his tale aware that the townspeople think of him as an imbecile but still he manages to tell his story as he must. He is "fully conscious," Wisse says, "of the distinction between the figure he cuts in the world and his own self-conception" (Wisse Schlemiel 61). He may be, she goes on, "choosing to play the fool in order to retain his moral sanity in the face of universal cynicism" (61). In fact, he has gone to the rabbi who has validated this point for him: It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself. (Gimpel 13)This wise advice helps alleviate Gimpel's anxiety for the moment of his audience with the rabbi, but he is taken in by the rabbi's daughter on his way out the door. The knowledge he has attained and the affirmation of his integrity within a universe being cruel to him is instantly subsumed by his gullibility in the face of any individual's attempt to victimize him. The entire town tests him. All of them conspire and make him the butt of jokes. He is a willing victim for their practical jokes because he has a sense of the larger context in which these gestures, to him, can do little harm. Even when a prospective bride is passed off as a virgin with an explanation that her bastard child is her younger brother, Gimpel refuses to be deterred. He finds convenient excuses every step of the way: "What was I supposed to do, run away from under the marriage canopy?" (Gimpel 16). Yes. That is an option. But our Gimpel — who we come to have some empathy for, despite our frustration at his own complicity in victimization — allows the course of events to consume him without his taking responsibility. His wife eventually gives birth to several children, none of them his — she confesses eventually on her deathbed — yet this is trifling in the face of a larger picture he envisions, one in which he believes his role to be to transcend the barbs of his townsfolk. Whether this striving for "goodness" on his part is commendable considering the price he pays for it, as Wisse points out, it is merely a tale within a book and not actual life. The point is to recognize his achievement in distinguishing himself from his entire town. Though he is perceived by others as a schlemiel figure, he is exonerated, we are supposed to be convinced, by rejecting the evil going on around him. Somehow he keeps hold of an inner faith in goodness that, even alone, sustains him and lets him survive the extenuating circumstances imposed on him. This story, written after the Holocaust, must be seen as Singer's advice to the small fish in the big pond: take the blows, the humiliation, the indignities and have faith in ultimate goodness for with it you will survive. As Gimpel concludes, in the next world it will not be so complicated. This passivity while pleasant in its embrace of gentleness, also carries a deathwish to relieve one from the burdens of the world. It advises to not take responsibility for one's personal matters but to wait for peace which is surely to come in the next world. This form of reasoning allows Gimpel, after his wife's passing, to abandon the six children he is at least caretaker for, with a casual toss-off farewell: "Be well...and forget that such a one as Gimpel existed" (Gimpel 31). As a moral tale and lesson in values, Gimpel's stance is appealing to a sense of justification of the righteous in the battle with a consuming evil. But it is also a failure to equip oneself with the tools necessary to grow and evolve within that framework. It is a decision to dream of a next world, a world that does not exist here and now. It is a willingness to refute participation with the current conditions by instilling one's energies to a faith in a fantasy of a Messiah to come or that good must inevitably win over evil. Resistance, however, is a strong propulsion towards some ultimate deliverance that, perhaps, is not quite yet evident. This insistence sustains and nourishes for the time being, until that distant moment arrives when the problems will be solved by some mysterious deliverer: "What does Satan really want?" Singer asks in an excised chapter of The Family Moskat. "Heaven forbid, surrender before the Redemption. The plague take him! May an arrow pierce his eye! If the devil wants sadness, then let him burst with frustration. We will be hopeful!" (Singer Moskat in Landis 112). Nazis bombing Warsaw. Jews go about their business as best they can. However, the desperation of the situation, the destruction of their homes, shops, and streets, makes their prayers and their adherence to rituals seem somehow foolish. It seems like a deliberate blinding to the facts, a pulling the blanket over the eyes in the hope that the reality will pass and leave them be to continue as usual. "Who cared about Hitler?" a Jew at the ritual bath wonders: It was the same old Satan. Sometimes he was an evil thought; another time he came in the form of an illness; a third time he fired artillery. Essentially he always wanted the same thing: to destroy faith, to confuse the mind. What, indeed, are all the actions of this world beside the study of Torah and the observance of the commandments? Delusions, trials, nets. If Satan cannot capture the soul in one way, he tries another..." (Moskat in Landis 112-3)To look at photographs, as reproduced in a book like The Vanished World, that chronicles the vibrancy of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the first decades of this century, knowing that this was all to be vanquished by Hitler's armies within a few year's time, goes beyond a sentimentality for a way of life that no longer exists. We can experience nostalgia regarding any old photos. Looking at these we attach the tragic irony that these streets, busy with merchants, this society going about its business is soon to be obliterated by an incredible calamity; a persecution so determined that it succeeded in wiping away the way of life of communities that had prospered peacefully in Poland, Russia, and Eastern Europe for several hundred years. We glimpse, perhaps even more directly than is told in stories, not only what existed but what was destroyed. That these poor quarters with their rotting structures were not allowed to deteriorate or be reconstituted with rebuilding, but instead were bombed and its people rounded up to be murdered — that entire settlements which had contributed so much to their nations were calculatedly leveled in an attempt to remove their existence from memory — such intolerance can be felt, looking at these photos, only as something unexplainable. Words like hatred, blame, and fear do little to explain Hitler's drive to not just expel but to crush and make invisible the Jewish people of this region. It is one thing to count on the coming of the Messiah as a hope for deliverance. But it is another thing to allow this belief to keep one passive and non-resistant to the bombardment of the Nazis. Faith is little defense against artillery. The Jews, a rational people, are overwhelmed by the insanity of what is occurring. They are not equipped to deal with the lack of logic that has befallen them in the guise of an entire nation set on their extermination. The hateful logic of a determined purge makes no sense to the Jews, yet it is happening despite their inability to comprehend it. To those vengeful involved it is a simple solution to their anger at deflated conditions: blame someone, ascribe fault to an easily identifiable target, a scapegoat. It is easier to decide on a course of action with this method: it allows just that aspect of brutality that the Jews have kept in check through devotion to learning and faith in human goodness to fall away and dissolve into a bully-victim situation. Of course it did not make sense to them. That so much evil is present at once is unfathomable to us still, 50 years later. Conclusion |