SINGER'S MANY DIMENSIONS OF LOVE

Author: By Christina Robb, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, July 26, 1985
Page: 39
Section: LIVING

writing better and better. And now that he is old and has started taking a more active hand in translating his own work, some of his stories are achieving that invisible mastery we call genius, and more of his own genius is coming out in the English translations.

If you think you've read all of these stories in The New Yorker, where Singer's work frequently appears, think again. Only seven of these stories originally appeared there, and many of the remaining 15 show more sexiness, religious faith, and insanity about love than The New Yorker lets in as a rule. But these are the contradictory qualities that make us human. Singer describes them with such relentless honesty and fraternal compassion that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

As usual, Singer's settings are the Yiddish Warsaw of his days as a young writer, the provincial towns and rural shtetls of his childhood in Jewish Poland, and the New York of his maturity. Yentl, the observant aunt whose gossip is literature, tells stories here about two Jewish girls who fall ruinously in love with foolish boys ("The Mistake, "The Image") and about two gentile counts and a gentile lady who live and die in a long, tense triangle ("Strong as Death is Love").

Passionate love wrenches Singer's characters into the strangest triangles and other polygons. And their background Communism or cosmopolitanism, Enlightenment or orthodoxy only seem to be stage settings for the real dramas of people's lives: the pull of God-created lusts against the pull of God.

In many of the stories, Singer himself, or a writer like him, gets a call
from a reader who craves to confess the most outrageous life story. In this way, Singer cleverly avoids the disbelief that readers might otherwise bring to plots that often seem too strange for fiction and only credible as gossip or journalism. In "The Secret," after reciting an embroiled autobiography, an old woman confesses that her daughter is unknowingly about to marry her own father. The woman pleads with the writer to persuade her daughter to reconsider. "I would not be able to, nor would I want to," he answers. "If God wants a kosher world, He will have to create one Himself."

In "Miracles," a scion of miracle-working rabbis arrives to bend the writer's ear. Time and again, he has escaped from the gravest threats only suddenly to find and finally lose apartments, money and love. The philosophy his life has taught him could stand for all of Singer's work: ''. . . Providence does not like to reveal its techniques and wears the mask of causality. If one could see its work, free choice would cease. By the way, even an insight into the ways of Providence would not lead to absolute faith. The brain is constructed so that a man can simultaneously be a believer and a nonbeliever. The Talmud's statement that the wicked do not repent even at the gates of Gehenna is a deep psychological truth. One may roast in hell and still remain an atheist. Sometimes I suspect that even God doubts his own existence."

Every story in this collection is about one or another kind of love, or sometimes many kinds of love, each of them stemming from encounters as chancy as birth or sitting down at the right moment in the New York Public Library. No coincidence Singer describes can be considered a mere accident. But on the other hand, no encounter must be read as a miracle, either. This faithfulness to the mystery of life as we perceive it gives Singer's stories their uncanny power. But a lifetime of exile from a culture that was destroyed by race hatred has taught Singer that God has a lot to answer for - and also that human beings rarely have the strength to disentangle themselves from their obsessions long enough to hear God answering.

ROBB ;07/24,10:47 NKELLY;07/26,11:51 FRIBUK