The Last Teller of Tales

By Stefan Kanfer

It was easy for Isaac Bashevis Singer to believe in miracles. He was proof that they existed. In 1935 the rabbi's son journeyed from Warsaw to New York City to visit his brother, novelist Israel Joshua Singer, and thereby escaped the Holocaust. He described vanished worlds in a dying language to a dwindling audience and was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was unknown at 40, but last week, when I.B. Singer died of a stroke at the age of 87, he was the most applauded Polish-born writer since Joseph Conrad.

Singer had every right to act the celebrity, yet he was never at home in the modern style. His works were often published first in Yiddish in The Jewish Daily Forward and later in translation. Saul Bellow brought him wide recognition by rendering the poignant anecdote Gimpel the Fool in English. But royalties were slow to arrive, and for many years Singer lived modestly on the earnings of his second wife Alma, a buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue. Until late in life he kept his name in the Manhattan phone book, and at lunch hour he could be found munching a vegetarian meal at his favorite West Side cafeteria. When he was asked, "Do you abstain from meat for your health?" Singer liked to focus his cerulean eyes on the interviewer. "I don't worry about my arteries," he would explain. "I worry about the arteries of the chicken."

Intellectuals and academics made him uncomfortable. Their questions about theology and philosophy were met with the deadpan reply, "We must believe in free will. We have no choice." Singer's favorite readers were the very young because "children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics." Besides, "they still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation and other such obsolete stuff."

So did the author. When I.J. Singer died in 1944, I.B. assumed the literary , role. But the elder brother had been a rationalist and a radical. The younger one was apolitical and haunted by "a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the universe." The biblical and supernatural tales of youth provided the underpinnings of his work. As Singer's rickety Yiddish typewriter chattered away, the ghettos of the Middle Ages rose up again, with a cast of erotic shtetl dwellers and phosphorescent imps. The Jews of 20th century Europe, consumed by the Nazi death camps, were granted the powers of speech and lust.

Throughout his career Singer was criticized for this mix of sexuality and catastrophe. In his Nobel lecture he finally replied: "The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man. While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths . . . to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice."

For most long-lived authors, the late 70s and early 80s are considered the declining years. Not for Singer: his mighty passion continued for several more volumes. He found new audiences in 1983 when Barbra Streisand adapted his Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy for the screen, and in 1989 when Paul Mazursky directed Enemies, A Love Story. In his 80s Singer offered eight works in translation, including The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories and a novel of prehistory, The King of the Fields. His last book, Scum, a glum moral fable, appeared last spring. (The Certificate will be published posthumously early next year.) None of his collections, novels, plays, autobiographies or children's books could be categorized -- except as productions of the last authentic teller of folk-tales. That was the way he wanted it. "The various schools and 'isms' of literature were invented by professors," he maintained. "Only small fish swim in schools." To the end, Isaac Bashevis Singer chose to swim alone. Leviathans always do.