Preacher

By Stefan Kanfer

STORIES FOR CHILDREN by Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus & Giroux 338 pages; $13.95

If Aesop were alive today," maintains Isaac Bashevis Singer, "he might have written a fable about a skunk who was psychoanalyzed to lose his stench, or about a hare who preached the dictatorship of hares . .. When art begins to ape science it becomes exactly that--an ape. It appears just as ridiculous when it tries with its limited powers to retard or push forward the wheels of history."

The phrases are terse, the message mordant. It might also be credible if Singer had not just published Stories for Children, a collection of 36 works for the young, dating back to Zlateh the Goat in 1966. Without the original illustrations, his fictions stand revealed as something more than mere bedtime stories. Many are informed by Freudian insights; tale after tale demonstrates a strong desire to prod the audience--and in some small way retard or push forward the wheels of history.

Some are reminiscent of the rabbinical parables Singer heard his father tell in Poland. A rich miser lends his neighbor a silver spoon. Next day the borrower returns the utensil, and brings with it a smaller one because "your tablespoon gave birth to a teaspoon." Delighted, the miser offers a set of candlesticks, only to learn, two days later, that they have passed away. "How can candlesticks die?" screams the rich man. Greed gets a talmudic reply: "If spoons can give birth, candlesticks can die."

In the town of Chelm, Singer's all-star cast shows the foolishness of unworldly wisdom. A congregation of elders, including Zeinvel Ninny, Feivel Thickwit, Dopey Lekisch, Gronam Ox and Shmendrick Numskull, encourages a wealthy man to move to the slums and live forever; after all, the records show that no one of means has ever died there. And when a huge carp slaps Gronam Ox with his tail, he sentences the fish to capital punishment: death by drowning in a lake.

In other tales, the message is saltier. Rabbi Leib and the witch Cunegunde contend for the soul of the world. The evil woman loses every battle of wills. Desperately she conceives a plan that cannot fail to undo her opponent: she will marry him. But in stories like The Wicked City, Singer is no longer content to twinkle. The angry retelling of Genesis changes Abraham's nephew Lot from a shepherd into the radical lawyer of Sodom. In one case, Lot represents a man who has murdered his own parents, throwing the defendant on the mercy of the court because he is now an orphan. When Jehovah condemns the town, Lot flees with his family. His wife, of course, turns into the traditional pillar of salt. But that hardly disturbs her husband; he retires to a cave with his daughters, and there they live like savages. It is a fate worthy of degenerates, concludes the author. "Except for defending criminals, there was nothing Lot knew how to do." In Utzel & His Daughter the editorial is even more obvious: a girl named Poverty is too gross and slothful to attract a bridegroom. She cannot even get into her shoes until she stops living on handouts, takes a job as a maid and loses weight. In good time, she becomes the bride of a wealthy youth.

Singer is hardly the first "serious" writer to produce children's books. He is not even the first Nobel laureate. T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats was aimed at the young; Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories has beguiled five generations. But both men sought relief from their vocation in child's play; Singer has declared juveniles to be his ideal audience. Indeed, in 1978, when he accepted the Nobel Prize, he gave the academy ten reasons to write for children, whom he regards as "the best readers of genuine literature .. . they still like clarity, logic and even such obsolete stuff as punctuation. Even more, the young reader demands a real story, with a beginning, a middle and an end." To underscore that belief, he often recalls the stranger who asked him to autograph her copy of Zlateh the Goat. The author hesitated with his pen. "Who is the child?" "It's for me," the woman confessed. "I am the child." The implication is clear: Singer is writing for the boy or girl in every adult. But these collected stories suggest another interpretation. In every tale, Singer's cautionary tone takes him from the grade school shelf and places him in the long line of moral fabulists from Aesop and La Fontaine to Kafka and Italo Calvino. All the time, it now appears, the rabbi's son has really been preaching to the adult in every boy and girl. --By Stefan Kanfer