REVIEW / BOOK
CRUMPLED SUITS OR WHITE SHOES

Author: By Christina Robb Globe Staff

Date: Friday, April 16, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING

One of my favorite stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer's does not appear in this marvellous collection. The story begins with the narrator in a dark, crumpled suit standing on the deck of a steamship bound for South America. He loves to travel, and he writes about transmigration of souls and other astral journeys, but he's afraid to fly in a plane. So he finds himself steaming out of New York Harbor with the cruise set. These are mostly retired men in white patent leather shoes and women with rollers in their platinized hair, waiting for Messiah to come for them - as, Singer writes, he surely will, because there is no one else to come for.

To Singer, we are all in crumpled suits or white patent leather. No one has The Answer, and everyone has a clue. We are all on an astral journey and afraid to fly. The world is full of demons and angels, butchers and yeshiva boys - and once in a while a yeshiva girl, the Yiddish equivalent of a female Eagle Scout. We think up pale philosophies to describe our ideal of a world without demons, angels and eccentricities, and these philosophies are the white patent leather shoes that some of us will be wearing when Messiah comes.

Singer will be in a crumpled suit, the one he bought when he arrived in the Warsaw ghetto from the Polish shtetl. He brought it to New York, and it has covered him through 50 years of writing Yiddish fiction in America. He wore it to Stockholm, to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979, though he may have appeared to be wearing a white tie and tails. He sweated in it while his parents, sister and 90 percent of Polish Jewry were being destroyed - and while he remembered and recorded the passions, jokes, torments and beatitudes of their lost villages and tenements.

At first his stories were about Warsaw and the Polish villages where he grew up. He wrote them in New York, while he was living in one-room walk-ups and boarding houses, writing a column of facts stranger than fiction for the Jewish Daily Forward. "Gimpel the Fool" and the stories from the collection by that name are the first classics he created.

Like Nathaniel Hawthorne and C. S. Lewis, Singer's early stories are often told by or about devils who are trying to tempt and corrupt single souls or whole villages, and this interest in the way that immortality dives and wriggles into our lives becomes more and more of his focus.

He kept this focus on religious experiences and psychical events and our intense emotional responses to them as he began to write about Yiddish New York, where he has now lived for nearly 50 years. Lately, he has often returned to the shtetl in stories that are often told by one of the characters, who plays a kind of Marlow of the study house or an Ancient Mariner of the village poor. But always the sweat and the rollers and the shoes and the suits shine and smell the way they do, and always the search for God and with God leads us on.

Singer's stories are are suspenseful and eerie, spiritual thrillers that are also psychological case-studies and very funny, or astonishing, satire. Perhaps no one writing now has as good a sense of how to make a wierd situation seem actual by describing with precision and affection the physical and emotional states of the people in them.

One of his later collections is called "Passions" - and that is the part of life that Singer is honest about first. He sacrifices all dogma to be true to the passions people feel when they are most intensely alive, most stretched and led on by their experience, whether it is cruel, bewildering, joyful, or (usually) all of these.

Forty-seven of the hundred stories he has written are included here. Singer chose them himself, and he has good taste in his work. They are incomparable, and I've never gotten enough of them.

ROBB ;04/14,10:32 FEENE;04/16,14: B07829807