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Conclusion The story structure allows Singer a framework for the pastiches he fashions from his remembrances. A small detail will often achieve epiphanous purpose as if the turmoil of the surrounding pages could be resolved, at least for the moment, in this focused awareness and lucidity. He most often points to the moments of direct contact — a lover's embrace; a father's kiss to the forehead of his son; but most often, conversation — as the recourse available to us ponderers and seekers of truth. While each story, novel, memoir, and even interview (of which there are many) is a seeking and an exegesis of the struggle and pain of that thrashing for meaning, his solution is to contain it all within the confined, neat boundaries of a tale that has a resolution in some form. It is a tremendously satisfying experience to be given this form of absolution repeatedly in going to his work. The narrator or protagonist's conflicts are absolved in their continuing, in their urgency, in their resolution to look for solutions, even in the face of disastrous affairs, mistakes, foibles, and the onslaught of external circumstances with which they had nothing to do. If there are not always happy endings that leave our heroes in better circumstances than when we met them, there is Singer's absolute belief that in relating the experience and the emotions it has touched off, we benefit by sharing one another's struggle. Repeatedly, Singer urged writers to tell a story. He had little fondness for writing that attempted anything different. People like stories, he would say. The reader knows the facts of life. He knows life just as much as the writer. When he reads a book he wants a story which he himself could not invent or could not organize and he is eager to read it done by a writer. And nothing else. (On Literature 10)What is the appeal of stories, what is satisfying? We can see literature as a grand newsletter of the organization we all, as humans, belong to. Singer's emphasis on the story assumes we all have something in common — not necessarily a familiarity of tribal custom or of shared rituals, but a common emotional response to people we are in contact with, and to our own isolated quest for individual meaning. When a father uncharacteristically bends down to kiss the forehead of his little son who is troubled by events in his life (as occurs in the short story, "The Mysteries of the Cabala"), Singer presumes our acquaintance with some form of this tenderness. It does not so much matter that this event occurs in Warsaw in the first half of this century, or that the man is the town's rabbi. The central event is the archetypal bond between a father and son, or even a learned, wiser authority and an innocent youngster frightened at his first taste of the powers of the overwhelming universe. It is to the young boy narrator's and our own satisfaction that his stress is met with such a receptive hearer as this story's finale gives. "Son, what has happened to you?" the father asks his obviously puzzled boy on their walk home together. That the father here seeks out, offers to listen to this troubled boy, is an event worthy of our attention and empathy. The narrative continues: All the lampposts became bent and all the lights foggy as my eyes filled with tears. "Papa, I don't know."And here the story can and does end. The narrator's quandaries, we presume, do not end, but for the time being, with this moment of tenderness and receptivity to the feelings of a fellow human being, we are given the gift of a momentary soothing, a temporary but effective quelling of our ultimate flailing. What else can you do but show sympathy? Of course, this show of sympathy is set up by Singer's expert crafting of the story. The feelings would not be so affected by a lesser writer. Previous to this moment, we have participated with the author and his boyhood chum as they have attempted to outdo each other in stories they make up about themselves. And as usual Singer works in a setting described in details that makes even this remote village come alive. As the boys compete and the contest becomes more exaggerated, Singer, as the young narrator, becomes aware of discrepancies in his and his companion's situations that force him to question his loyalty to his chum, Mendel. When Mendel brings the contest to a final crescendo by announcing that he intends to become a bandit and that he is in love, young Singer is thrown into turmoil by his confrontation with the eventuality of this separation. He goes running to the study house where he is eventually lucky enough to be comforted by his father. This will not be enough to make him stop his quest. In other tales of his youth we find Singer continuously seeking answers. He never allows himself to be content with what others have come to accept as authority. Even as a young boy he sets himself off against Mendel and his father, who both resort to "what is written" (Mendel, 133; father, 135) as an explanation, as rules to be governed by, and as examples to be followed. The pockets of Singer's gabardine, in contrast, are "filled with storybooks I rented two for a penny" (Pleasure 125). From the sharing of tales, Grace Farrell Lee sees a community formed, and redemption in that union: Singer's fiction reveals to us that despite our exile from transcendent forms of meaning, we are given some form of an answer to the dilemma of human existence. We are offered the freedom to choose the profound consolation of love. (Exile 98)Yasha Mazur, in the midst of his tumbling ethical downfall, mingles his fingers with those of Haskell, the water bearer in The Magician of Lublin, to achieve a moment of solidarity with a fellow exile. Singer, in his weaving of tales of fallacies and human weakness and striving, offers a similar comfort by allowing us a chance to share our feelings of doubt and longing. "By choosing to intertwine our fingers with those of another we can in a sense share our exile, and through the very act of that sharing, we can begin to transcend it" (Exile 98). In the act of sharing we are absolved from isolation and meaninglessness. This loving act, this compulsion to engage with our comrades, while not the ordering of the universe, "imparts to life some value and significance" (Lee Exile 98). If the passing of the end of the nineteenth century can be described as the permeation of Nietzsche's God Is Dead concept, then perhaps the ensuing century's Age of Anxiety can be seen as an attempt to acclimate to this new condition. Where God served for centuries to allay anxieties for those who put their trust in him, Him, Her, or it, the dawning of the twentieth century, with its urging of other priorities, asks for a new palette to deal with the discredited traditional values. For many who are touched with enough enlightenment to resist subordination to authorities that would repress their needs, the frequency of this century's revolutions have signaled hope and at least a start of liberation. As we have seen, liberation takes time. Stalwart resistance can be expected from those whose power and privilege is questioned and nullified. And once liberation is achieved, the question still remains: What now? But the movement today is toward at least a fuller understanding of repressive systems, a questioning of them and a resistance. The liberation movements of this century indicate a strong resistance to domination and an urgent need to achieve individual and group expression that struggles on under the blanket of whatever alleged authorities would attempt to quell it. It makes sense that given a choice, Singer would choose to leave the strict, punitive system of his father's court at the beginning of this century and strike out on his own for the uncharted and mysterious kingdom of secular society, with its promise of sexual fulfillment and heretofore untasted pleasures. It was a brave step to reject his family and community's customs, but it was a necessary act of survival for him on a personal level and for the Jews as a people. Without some assimilation, without some negotiation and commerce with their host nations, the Jews were threatened with extinction. To say he rejected stifling by his tribal customs and was attracted to the allurements of the cosmopolitan Warsaw implies a judgment of decadence from within a system that prefers guilt and worships the stark and deprived in its belief in the straight and narrow. In today's terms we can castigate the religious system as exclusionary and deprivational, and support the secular society as rich, inclusive, and satiating. One risks being stigmatized with being called disrespectful, or invalidated by being dismissed as a blasphemer, in finding something to condemn in a religion. But that argument has been used too long by those in power to negate any claims and to sidestep any debate of the issues and concerns. Singer's popularity is understandable because of the obvious appeal of his characters and their situations. Readers are admitted entry into a world he makes accessible. He has taken big steps in coloring his personalities, bringing them out of the nineteenth-century types who function within a narrow narrative enterprise to a psychological portraiture that has real power to entertain us in its exposure of the inner workings of the individual personalities. The problem is in his perpetuation of mythlike stereotypes that, on first exposure, seem to delve more deeply than the typical. What in fact is typical is the traditional male viewpoint which has been so pervasive for so long as to be unquestioned. As we begin to question the assumptions that underlie this perspective, we can begin to disassemble what amounts to a stance entrenched in maintaining power relationships — whether it be between man and woman or man and god — that has been resistant to change, and not open to hearing from those elements that challenge its dominion and who have suffered from being excluded and unheard. While Singer attests to a commitment to the emotions that supersedes any allegiances to national, political, or artistic groupings, and recognizes the uncategorizable, in other instances he is not as enlightened. In Meshugah he states: "We agreed it was the mission of literature to express the emotions with honesty — savage, antisocial, and contradictory as the emotion might be" (124). However, this edict applies only to himself; the implication is that he will express his own emotions, superseding the range of possibilities of his other characters. This is not to dismiss this literature, which is rich in insight and delightful on so many other levels. However, in acknowledging its limitations, by pointing out some primary problems, we can perhaps begin to see beyond the structures that have suppressed a sector of our population and thereby limited growth for the entire society. Bibliography |