The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer     by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translated by others and Saul Bellow Original language: Yiddish Published by Noonday Press Pub. Date: September 1983 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback Dimensions: 1.63 x 9.18 x 6.16 inches ISBN: 0374517886 List Price: $18.00 Not available for ordering Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 1981 Format: Hardcover ISBN: 0374126313 List Price: $30.00, £19.07 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £19.07

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Justly I.B.Singer is the most celebrated and successful Yiddish writer ever. The variety and the breadth of his production make him a real reference point on Polish Jewry in different periods and circumstances, including that of American emigration. More than that, and the main reason for his success, is that his writing is a joy to know.

All Yiddish fiction is in some way a bridge between two worlds; the isolated world of East European Jewry, closed up for hundreds of years in its own particular culture, and the modern world in which Yiddish novels and short stories were written and read. The Yiddish story started off by giving a modern spin to the folk tales saturated in pious moral truths and the superstitious yarns about Dybbuks* and Demons. I.B.Singer, in both his personal history and in his work seems to perfectly embody the idea of Yiddish literature as a bridge.

Singer’s father, by whose life and surroundings he was immensely influenced, was a Hasidic Rabbi, immersed in the old pious culture that both disdained secular culture and reached out to miracles and magical goings-on; held to be signs of God’s presence. His mother was more rationalistic and sanguine as was his brother Israel Joshua Singer, a leftist Yiddish writer [see this Babel Guide]. He himself set out on a career in the modern world of Warsaw publishing before emigrating to New York where he wrote regularly for a Yiddish newspaper and then to a far wider audience.

I.B.Singer seemed to live and share the consciousness of both the antiquated world and a quite modern one. Some of his stories preach a ferocious sexual moralism for instance while in others he is quite casual about adultery. His stories are generally set either in the modern milieu of 1930s Warsaw coffee houses, New York newspaper offices and Miami apartment complexes or in the seventeenth, eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries — but about which he writes as if that was yesterday.

This anthology of Singer stories chosen by the author himself from his twelve books of translated stories is a solid and widely-available collection. The stories bear out the Singerian manifesto he posts in his introduction ’Genuine literature...has the magical power of merging causality with purpose, doubt with faith, the passions of the flesh with the yearnings of the soul.’

Of the forty-seven stories here, some are already covered in this Babel Guide’s reviews of general Jewish or Yiddish anthologies. Of the rest some of the highlights are; The Spinoza of Market Street set in early twentieth century Warsaw and which creates an excellent narrative from the adventure of intellectual conquest and scholarship; The Destruction of Kreshev with its fascinating detail of eighteenth century Polish peasant and Jewish life including the story of a follower of the ’False Messiah’ Sabbatai Zevi; the terrific story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy that Barbara Streisand turned into a film; the humane and moving The Letter Writer set amongst ageing Jewish refugees in New York while the Dybbuk-and-Demon I.B.Singer is shown in stories like Taibele and her Demon, although he also gently satirises occult phenomena in The Psychic Journey.

A less obvious but fascinating moment of Jewish history is retailed in The Manuscript, a chilling account of the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 where Polish Yiddish writers fled from Warsaw to Bialystock in Soviet territory for uneasy meetings with their Soviet counterparts. Three Encounters beautifully combines the three major elements in Singer’s stories, the Jews, marginal people of various sorts and, above all, great storytelling.

Finally, because quite a number of his stories deal with older people, Old Love an amazing, spare mediation on old age and the older person’s vision of life, clearly written when Singer was at the height of his powers.

Singer has been compared with the famous painter of the Russian-Jewish shtetl Marc Chagall and his vivid portrait-painting seems to have never wavered in over fifty years of writing about the Jewish worlds of Europe and North America.

’When Dr. Fischelson tired of observing the sky, his glance dropped to Market Street below. He could see a long strip extending from Yanash’s market to Iron Street with the gas lamps lining it merged into a string of fiery dots. Smoke was issuing from the chimneys on the black, tin roofs; the bakers were heating their ovens, and here and there sparks mingled with the black smoke. The street never looked so noisy and crowded as on a summer evening. Thieves, prostitutes, gamblers, and fences loafed in the square which looked from above like a pretzel covered with poppy seeds. The young men laughed coarsely and the girls shrieked. A peddler with a keg of lemonade on his back pierced the general din with his intermittent cries. A watermelon vendor shouted in a savage voice, and the long knife which he used for cutting the fruit dripped with the blood-like juice. Now and again the street became even more agitated. Fire engines, their heavy wheels clanging, sped by; they were drawn by sturdy black horses which had to be tightly curbed to prevent them from running wild. Next came an ambulance, its siren screaming. Then some thugs had a fight among themselves and the police had to be called. A passer-by was robbed and ran about shouting for help. Some wagons loaded with firewood sought to get through into the courtyards where the bakeries were located but the horses could not lift the wheels over the steep curbs and the drivers berated the animals and lashed them with their whips. Sparks rose from the clanging hoofs. It was now long after seven, which was the prescribed closing time for stores, but actually business had only begun. Customers were led in stealthily through back doors. The Russian policemen on the street, having been paid off, noticed nothing of this. Merchants continued to hawk their wares, each seeking to out shout the others.

"Gold, gold, gold," a woman who dealt in rotten oranges shrieked.

"Sugar, sugar, sugar," croaked a dealer of overripe plums.

"Heads, heads, heads," a boy who sold fishheads roared.’ (p81-2 The Spinoza of Market Street)

’I left home at seventeen. I told my parents the truth: I didn’t believe in the Gemara or that every law in the Shulchan Aruch had been given to Moses on Mount Sinai; I didn’t want a marriage arranged by a matchmaker; I was no longer willing to wear a long gaberdine or grow earlocks. I went to Warsaw, where my parents had once lived, to seek an academic education and a profession. My older brother, Joshua, lived in Warsaw and had become a writer, but he wasn’t able to help me. At twenty I came back home with congested lungs, a chronic cough, no formal education, no profession, and no way that I could see of supporting myself in the city. During the time I was away, my father had been appointed rabbi of Old-Stikov in Eastern Galicia — a village of a few dozen crooked shacks, with straw-covered roofs, built around a swamp. At least, in the fall of 1924 that’s how Old-Stikov appeared to me. It had rained all October, and those shacks lay reflected in the swamp as if it were a lake. Ruthenian peasants, stooped Jews in gaberdines, women and girls wearing shawls over their heads and men’s boots waded in the mud. Clouds of mist swirled in the air. Crows soared overhead, cawing. The sky hung low, leaden heavy with storms. The smoke from chimneys didn’t rise but drifted downward toward the soaked earth.’ (Three Encounters p 473)