Introduction

Introduction
Fear of Safety

"...the Poland of my youth still exists. You could say I have one foot here and one foot there." — I.B. Singer (Nagler 112)

     Isaac Bashevis Singer created from a situation of exile, an exile from his geographical homeland as well as from the traditional Jewish way of life. He was displaced not only by a move from Poland to America but also by the transition from nineteenthth-century village life to twentieth-century modernity. In his continuous attempt to reconcile what was lost, Singer held onto the past as a ballast. His fantasy offered him a level of comfort but also limited him in finding new values or creating fresh solutions for current circumstances. His choice as a modern author to enshrine his recently destroyed past burdened him with attachments that prevented a constructive reckoning with crises of his time.
     In returning to past values he found a greatness to which his modern characters could only fail to attain. The message of his work suggests that we must retain a measure of the decency he remembered so fondly of the people that surrounded him as a child. It is an appeal that one can hardly fault. Yet, the constant judgment he implied by repeatedly setting modern problems against the golden aura of a vanished world failed to allow his contemporary characters to emerge from their roots and grow into beings comfortable with their times, or be prepared to handle conflicts in any mature way.
     We are offered a great deal of comfort in his writing, as characters do for us the work of grappling with moral choices. It is a satisfying experience to empathize with his characters in their struggles. Singer's magnificent achievement stems from the connection we feel to his stories. His artistry is so refined and he is such a master storyteller that we are constantly close to and in tune with the situations he is describing Singer argued with fate and queried the place a modern person has in contemporary circumstances. Ultimately he found that our feelings will preserve us and that our emotional lives are what make us interesting. This inner world transcends time and geographical or ethnic boundaries. Singer's celebration of the personal was an act of liberation. It let the individual's struggle against oppression — political situations or the depersonalization of modern technology — attain significance and vital importance.
     His art is redemptive in the way it honored a way of life that shrunk during his lifetime. It keeps that era alive, and makes it accessible to an audience that might otherwise forget or remain ignorant of its ever having existed.
     He made of his past an authentic art. The villages of poor, uneducated people Singer often depended on for his material were an embryo from which he derived a world of characters and a sense of community that continues to inform us.
     Yet in spite of the realistic aspects of his protagonists' struggles, and despite the fact that things often go dreadfully wrong, there is an overriding sense in his work of the fairy tale or the morality tale, with the narrator holding the strings. Within this structure the operator's choices are limited; the boundaries to which he is obliged press in.
     Deprived and constantly returning to the dry well, there was a constant cry in his work for a lyricism that has been supplanted. While valuable for preserving the richness of the closing of an epoch, and while he made of his documentation a vibrant celebration, his limitations need to be viewed as springing from the assumptions within the value system he both defended and derided.