REVIEW BOOK
WHEN TRUTH RUNS INTO FICTION
Author: By Christina Robb Globe Staff
Date: Friday, July 3, 1981
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING
LOST IN AMERICA, by Isaac Bashevis Singer, illustrated by Raphael Soyer
and translated from Yiddish by Joseph Singer. Doubleday. 259 pp. $17.95.
When Isaac Bashevis Singer was still in his 20s, roaming a Warsaw that
Hitler hadn't touched yet, he followed his older brother Israel Joshua into
the writing trade.
Good fiction had three requirements, he decided. It had to have a
suspenseful plot. It had to be written with a sense of urgency. And the writer
had to feel that only he could tell this story in this way.
Singer has applied these three rules to the three volumes of autobiography
he has written, and I suspect that, as they've progressed and the suspense and
adventure they record has become more and more adult, they have moved more and
more into the realm of invention.
"Actually, I don't believe that the story of any human life can be
written. It is beyond the power of literature. I had to skip events that I
consider important. I had to distort facts as well as dates and places of
occurrences in order not to hurt thse who were close to me. I consider this
work no more than ficion set against a background of truth. I would call the
whole work Contributions to an Autobiography I Never Intend to Write,' " he
confesses in a short note to this latest volume.
Singer is one of those writers who is always contributing to his
autobiography - or plagiarizing from it. His first stories and novels were
about life in the Jewish shtetls of rural Poland and the ghettos of Warsaw - a
life he had lived. Then, after he had been lost in Yiddish-speaking America
for decades, he began to write stories and novels about that.
You cannot read the fast-moving, romantic, intriguing stories that he has
actually labeled autobiography - "A Little Boy in Search of God," "A Young Man
in Search of Love" and now "Lost in America" - without believing his life was
as suspenseful and full of adventure as the stories he tells about it.
Singer has that combination of shyness and inquisitiveness that frequently
lead people into writing, and in his youth he often lived an intensely private
life. The people he found easiest to accept were women, and he invited them
into his privacy passionately. He lived with all stops out. When he had to
sneak over borders to get a permanent visa, he chose that moment to begin a
love affair and to speculate about the secrets of creation and the future of
the cosmos. He needed to do all those things; the speculation, the craving to
know was as powerful as desire. And in the cruelty of a world in which Hitler
and Stalin were loose at once, Singer's desire always had to fight despair.
He became a vegetarian as soon as he sat down for dinner on the French
liner that sailed him to New York in the '30s. He mourned the cockroaches and
bedbugs that he swatted in the sleasy New York rooms he moped in, and he mused
about their fates. He had endless conversations with God about his atheism. He
burned with lust but could only embrace women he loved. He got lost in America
and found freedom to tell the truth about frailty, inconsistency, jealousy,
cruelty, morbidity, passion, love and hope. This last volume of admitted
autobiography is as good as the Nobel Prize-winner's best, and Raphael Soyer's
pencil drawings and paintings have a power and honesty that sing with
childlike simplicity in contrast to Singer's complex, candid maturity.
ROBB ;07/01,10:42 FEENE;07/03,12: B07900071
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