REVIEW / BOOK
THE SINGULAR SINGER
ISAAC BASHWVIS SINGER - THE MAGICIAN OF WEST 86TH STREET, BY PAUL KRESH.
DIAL. 441 PP. $14.95
Author: By Christina Robb Globe Staff
Date: Friday, January 4, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING
He had a son by a woman he won't name - a Polish Communist who went with
the boy to Russia and Israel when Singer left Warsaw for the United States. He
had a hysterical sister and a boyish affair with a tubercular necrophiliac who
thought she was psychic.
Isaac Bashevis Singer really is a character from his Nobel Prize-winning
tales of demons and passions in Polish Jews.
Born in 1904, he grew up the second son of a poor, fervent Hasidic rabbi
and an equally pious but more rational rabbi's daughter in the tiny Polish
Jewish villages of Leoncin and Bilgoray and the big city of Warsaw. He had
visions and dreams instead of toys. His brother Joshua's words became
"embedded in my brain. Closing my eyes as he talked, I saw shapes and colors
that I had never seen before which kept shifting into designs and forms."
He followed his brother to Warsaw and worked as a proofreader on the
magazine Joshua wrote for. He wrote stories of his own, too, about Jewish
witches, devils and prostitutes, and from the beginning critics and editors
kept nagging, why didn't he write about nice Jews? What would people think?
And from the beginning Singer kept answering that there was more to learn
about normality from the odd case than from the normal.
He was fascinated by the folklore and fauna of Polish Jewish occultism.
But he had enough of his mother in him to study rather than believe, and he
confesses his doubts frankly about the reality of experiences he's been
putting into fiction for nearly 50 years.
"I read all the books and magazines of the crackpots. I consider myself
one of the crackpots," he says. "Yet I cannot really tell you that I saw a
ghost."
Singer followed his brother to the United States in 1935 and started
freelancing for the Jewish Daily Forward, New York's biggest (and now only)
Yiddish daily. His wife Alma - the refugee daughter of a rich German Jewish
weaver - was married when he met her in the Catskills in the late '30s. She
divorced in 1939, the year Nazis killed his mother and brother in Poland. And
within the decade Joshua was dead - of a heart attack at 51 in 1944. Paul
Kresh, an old friend and admirer, doesn't document Singer's reactions to all
his wartime losses very clearly. But however Singer felt at the time, he
responded with a prolific output of outstanding novels and short stories.
First there were big realistic novels in his brother's style: "The Family
Moskat," "The Manor" and "The Estate." Then came the brilliant novels,
stories, memoirs and children's books of the '50s, '60s and '70s, rife with
demons but also clear, always written first in Yiddish ("Yiddish contains
vitamins that other languages don't have") and then translated and edited in
English.
Kresh's prose tends to homogenize Singer's life and work into food for
adulation. Too many sentences start something like: "Isaac's next triumph
after becoming an internationally celebrated author . . ." But his subject has
led a fascinating life and has a fascinating mind, and much of the time this
is a fascinating, though far from exhaustive, biography.
ROBB ;01/02,17:10 ALLAG;01/07,09: B08051008
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