SINGER'S DEATH ENDS A VIBRANT ERA IN YIDDISH LITERATURE

Author: By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, July 26, 1991
Page: 37
Section: LIVING

But most would agree that the death Wednesday of Isaac Bashevis Singer at the age of 87 marks the end of an extraordinary period in American and Jewish literature -- a vibrant era, lasting perhaps a century, in which Eastern European Jewish writers and poets grappled with the complex issues of living as a tradition-bound Jew in the modern, secular world.

"A historical moment has passed," said Aaron Lansky, who heads the National Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst-based organization devoted to the preservation of Yiddish literature. "His death is saddening because it marks the end of an illusion. It makes it clear that this period of Yiddish creativity in literature is coming to an end."

In a 1985 interview, Singer, who maintained apartments in both New York and Miami, acknowledged that he had lost count of the number of books he had written. But according to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which issues most of his translated writings, the Singer works that have been published in English include 12 books of short stories, 13 children's books, three collections and four books of memoirs. Among Singer's best-known works are "Gimpel the Fool," "The Family Moskat," "Satan in Goray" and "The Magician of Lublin." Most of his work was first published in serialized form in the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper based in New York, and many stories have yet to be translated into English.

Roger Straus, Singer's publisher, said he has at least two more Singer works in the process of being translated that will be published next year. Yesterday, Straus called Singer "the greatest writer of the century, without question. There was so little in his huge body of work one would call less than first-rate."

Born in 1904 in Leoncin, Poland, Singer was the son of a pious rabbi who considered secular writing heretical, and a more skeptical, rationalist mother. These two perspectives collide in the stories that he began to write as a young man, first in Warsaw and later in New York, where he moved in 1935 to be near his brother, the eminent writer I.J. Singer, whom the younger Singer referred to in his memoirs as his mentor.

But it was I.B. Singer who became preeminent in America; indeed he is said to be the only living Yiddish writer whose translated work has caught the imagination of American readers. Yet even though he spent more than half a century in America, he consistently revisited in his writing the rabbi's court on Krochmalna Street, the cafeterias of Warsaw, the shtetl of Bilgoray; his books were peopled by psychics, intellectuals, peasants and the spirits of Jewish folklore.

"He'll turn wherever he is into the streets of Poland," Singer's friend Dorothea Straus said in a 1985 interview. "Consciously or unconsciously he is interested in preserving the culture he left."

Part of what made Singer an astonishing, if not legendary, figure was the
size and diversity of his audience. Until he stopped publishing in the Forward in the mid-1980s, he had a large and loyal Yiddish following, and yet his translated writings also captivated young American readers. Until his early 80s, he gave readings on college campuses to packed audiences, delighting them with his witty repartee at question-and-answer sessions.

"He belonged to the people, but yet he bridged the gap between a popular audience and an elite audience," author and critic Leslie Fiedler said yesterday. "In some ways, he was the last of those who will be able to reach a mass audience and still be utterly at home in the Yiddish culture."

Still, he remained controversial to the end. Though he rejoiced when he won the Nobel Prize that the award was a triumph for the Yiddish language, he in some ways remains a prophet without honor in his own land. There are Yiddishists who still argue that he didn't deserve the prize, that other Yiddish writers deserved it more, most notably Chaim Grade. It has been said that until he stopped publishing in the Forward there were religious linotype operators who refused to touch Singer's copy because they considered it so traif (tainted) to their Orthodox sensibilities. Others condemned his writing for what they interpreted as a strong antifeminist streak.

While he could be charming, engaging, generous, even -- in his 80s -- flirtatious, he was also contentious, obstinate and unforgiving. (He attacked Barbra Streisand in newspaper interviews for making "Yentl," her film version of one of his stories, which he derided as "artistic suicide.") He was known to demand payment from reporters who interviewed him, and -- despite the wealth he accumulated from his published writing -- was always stubbornly "tightfisted," according to a colleague at the Jewish Forward. Although he wrote for the paper on a free-lance basis, "he used to call up and demand vacation pay. He was very cautious the way he lived. He lived the life of a poor man."

Lester Goran, who until three years ago taught a writing course with Singer at the University of Miami, believes that Singer, at the end of his life, was bewildered and jarred by America and by the acclaim that he received after he won the Nobel Prize.

"He was an extraordinary man, trapped by his fame, by the changes in the 20th century; he deplored contemporary matters," said Goran, who has just completed a book about Singer called "The Bright Streets of Surfside." His fame "became too important to him, an identity in itself, and he fought to cope with it but didn't know quite what to do. It made him unhappy," Goran said.

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