The metamorphosis

THE CENTENNIAL OF Isaac Bashevis Singer, the legendary Yiddish writer born in a Polish shtetl a hundred years ago last Wednesday, has become an occasion not only of reevaluating his distinguished oeuvre but of much gnashing of teeth. While many consider him one of the best Jewish writers of all time, others in the Yiddish literary world see him as melodramatic, profane, and even unworthy of the Nobel Prize he received in 1978. "I am very sorry that America is celebrating that blasphemous buffoon," Inne Grade, the widow of rival Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, told The New York Times last month.

Singer's was the journey of the immigrant writer who makes it big in America by styling himself as "ethnic." But in the process, did Singer misrepresent the Eastern European past to achieve success in America? Did he give New World readers a mythologized, sentimentalized picture of the Old World that, after the Holocaust, had suddenly ceased to exist? In short, did this Yiddish master, who wrote stories inhabited by demons, sell his soul to the devil?

Raised in a religious family, Singer spoke a total of seven languages, including Hebrew, Polish, and of course Yiddish, before he uttered his first English word. He arrived in New York in 1935, at the age of 31, having just published in Warsaw his debut novel, "Satan in Goray," an hallucinating depiction of fanatic mysticism set in a small town in 1648. His models at the time were Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, and Thomas Mann. But his most enduring inspiration was his own older brother, Israel Joshua Singer, the successful author of such novels as "The Brothers Ashkenazi," "Yoshe Kalb," and other classics, and a famous contributor to The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish newspaper in Lower Manhattan whose circulation in the early half of the 20th century reached an astounding 200,000.

At the time of his arrival on American shores Singer was still Itzjok Zynger. His immediate reaction to what he saw was one of sheer dismay: Already in Warsaw he had tackled the tension between tradition and secularism, but his transatlantic journey added the element of materialism to the equation. Furthermore, the Yiddish language he heard in Coney Island and Brooklyn, where he found apartments, was disgusting to him, a patois replete with Anglicisms to a degree almost impossible to understand. In his ears, this mongrelized American Yiddish -- what some called Yinglish -- must have sounded like the Spanglish heard in every major urban center today. How could he, an aspiring European author shaped by the modernist spirit, make himself at home in such an alien place?

Jewish newcomers to Ellis Island and beyond didn't have much time for their spiritual and intellectual betterment. Their prime concern, as is always the case with immigrants, was the business of survival. The immigrant writer usually finds his themes in that plight, seeking to offer a mirror to the community and to let others beyond it know what it means to be geographically dislocated and culturally disoriented. Singer survived, even flourished, but his imagination remained trained on the past. Throughout his life he retained the mentality of an immigrant: looking back at what was lost with remorse, appreciating what was won with bewilderment.

Like his brother, Singer began contributing stories and essays to The Jewish Daily Forward, where he was given precious space in which to explore his past and, all the more significant, a channel through which to build his own readership. Yet Singer would have been forever ghettoized had he not sought a space beyond his immediate ethnic boundaries. In the end, his survival depended not on his Yiddish-language readership but on the larger, American one. And at mid-century, Jews in the United States were increasingly part of the latter group. Having lived for centuries in the countryside, with little contact with the larger European society, they had moved to urban ghettos. Now they were moving into the broader currents of American culture, and Singer seized the opportunity to become a bridge between the Old World and the New -- to serve as a chronicler of that most profound transformation.

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Singer's first translated novel, a family saga called "The Family Moskat," was a Balzac-like exploration of Jewish Warsaw spanning several centuries, with a cast of hundreds and a direct style that sought to ask the question: Are Jews mere puppets without free will in a clash of larger historical forces? Designed, like his previous work, to evoke the tension between tradition and secularism, it was serialized in Yiddish in 1945-48 and was broadcast by a Yiddish radio station in New York. In 1950, it was released in English by Knopf, but only after Singer agreed to abbreviate it and make it more marketable to an American audience.

"The Family Moskat" went largely unnoticed, receiving scattered if favorable reviews, but it hardly mattered -- Singer's reinvention as an American writer was already under way. Around that time his nom de plume was Anglicized, and he became Isaac Bashevis Singer (Bashevis comes from Batcheva, his mother's maiden name). In 1953, at the request of critic Irving Howe and Howe's friend Eliezer Greenberg, Saul Bellow, who was just finishing "The Adventures of Augie March," translated Singer's marvelous story "Gimpel the Fool." When it was published in Partisan Review in May 1953, it was a revelation to a whole generation of intellectuals who were the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants and who found in Singer, then only 49, a grandfatherly figure in whom their own contradictory feelings toward their Jewishness and the receding world of their fathers could be reconciled.

To the Partisan Review crowd, Singer was a consummate modernist with a folkloric imagination. More sophisticated than those read by their parents, here was a Yiddish writer versed in both Spinoza and the Talmud, unswayed by Communism and Zionism, and, most important, one who wrote of dybbuks and witches while also understanding himself as an integral part of Western literature. Ironically, it was only at this point -- embraced by a readership becoming detached from the immigrant experience yet eager to understand that experience from a larger historical perspective -- that Singer became an "ethnic" writer.

Through the help of a cadre of mostly female translators (a number of whom spoke little or no Yiddish), Singer soon became the czar of Yiddish literature in American circles, even as other important -- perhaps even more sophisticated -- voices in Yiddish literature, such as Jacob Glatstein, Chaim Grade, and Abraham Sutzkever, were eclipsed. By the late 1960s, Singer's stories, interviews, and essays were running in periodicals like The New York Times, Esquire, Interview, The New Yorker, even Playboy. He also wrote prolifically for children. By the time he died, in Florida in 1991, he had seen his work adapted on regional and Broadway stages and turned into corny movies like Barbra Streisand's "Yentl" (which he disdained). When Singer was awarded the Nobel in 1978, President Jimmy Carter sent a telegram thanking him for making America proud.

Yet Singer's critics -- and there has always been a battalion of them -- claim he brought shame upon the world of their fathers. They accuse him of offering a portrait of the shtetl that is exaggerated, full of dybbuks, goblins, and witches, a landscape where the supernatural predominates and where there appears to be an obsession with eroticism, as sex and magic go hand-in-hand. But whether Singer's portrait of shtetl life was accurate misses the point. Fiction isn't supposed to be factually accurate but to be truthful. And that Singer certainly was -- in his own complicated and subjective way. His stories ought not to be read as a historical record of the destruction of Eastern European Jewry but as a tapestry depicting a whole array of human possibilities.

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In "The American Scene," published in 1905, Henry James wrote of "the great ethnic question." He had visited New York's Lower East Side and had seen "a mob sifted and strained." James was taken by "the various possibilities of the waiting spring of intelligence, i.e., there was no lump of people passively accepting notions of their intellectual inferiority because they had not mastered the King's English." He described the mob as "a public" and wondered "how new a thing under the sun the resulting public would be."

Singer is one of those who emerged from that polyglot mob, as do, metaphorically, all ethnic writers. Their newness brings forth an impossible contradiction: No sooner are they accepted by an ever-changing mainstream culture than their message is questioned . Are their voices authentic? Have they peddled a mythologized version of their background? Who tapped them to speak for their group anyway?

Like all ethnic writers -- and, for that matter, all artists -- Singer represents. But represents what? The word itself has recently been reenergized. Today some of us simply "represent. . ." -- and the rest of the sentence is up for grabs. Be careful, though: Not everyone represents, just some of us. John Grisham doesn't represent and neither does Alice Munro. The ethnic writer does: She is asked to speak for a segment of the population not yet in complete view. And the request becomes a burden: Is the ethnic the representative of her particular bunch? Why can't she be free to represent other bunches as well, the way John Updike is allowed to write about Rabbit Angstrom, the prototypical white middle-class American, but also about Brazil?

Singer is different from the ethnic writers in vogue today. In fact, he might be said to have opened the path to a profound transformation in American literature. Many Jewish novelists who followed have come to be seen as consummately American. Think of Saul Bellow, whose brainy characters constantly reflect on their Jewish identity, or Philip Roth, who could write a narrative about several generations of a Jewish family in New Jersey and call it "American Pastoral." Indeed, bookstores today are full of novels by and about Cuban Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans, and so on. At some point, it seems that the "ethnic American" has became one of the most representative Americans of all.

Unlike Singer, contemporary writers from Chang-Rae Lee to Junot Diaz didn't launch their careers in ethnic newspapers like The Jewish Daily Forward. They were always "native speakers." (Though ironically so, as demonstrated by Lee's choice of that phrase for the title of his 1995 novel about a Korean-American greengrocer's son who grows up to be a remote, alienated intelligence analyst.) Whether these writers came to America with another tongue, or whether they were born here, their literary presence is, from the start, in English, never in translation. In this sense, African-American writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, all of whom are ethnic, are also native.

In Singer's case, translation did the trick. His odyssey was not only geographical but verbal: He traveled from Yiddish to English on his way to literary canonization.

Singer was no doubt a savvy businessman -- which, needless to say, isn't a sin, at least not in America. He understood to perfection his reader's hunger for a version of the Jewish past with extreme emotions and bizarre twists. And though he had little interest in politics, he surely recognized his public's need to see history as a hurricane of opposing ideologies in which a disenfranchised minority (in this case, the Jews) is forever vulnerable.

And yet, did Singer sell his soul the devil? Did he betray his roots to become a mainstream success? Of course he did. What else makes him so quintessentially American? Itzjok Zynger and Isaac Bashevis Singer -- a metamorphosis to reckon with.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the editor of the Library of America's three-volume "Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories," which has just been published.