The Storyteller as Sorcerer and Changeling

“Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life,” by Janet Hadda, opens with an endearing reminiscence of the author’s heroic effort to search out the real man behind the celebrated (and calculated) public image of the beloved Yiddish storyteller. Hadda dared to cross what she calls “the fuzzy boundary between imagination that Bashevis maintained in his life and transmitted through his writing,” and she discovered that Singer was capable of working a certain mind-beclouding magic on both his friends and his enemies.

Isaac Bashevis Singer comes across as a showman, a sorcerer and a changeling in the pages of Hadda’s provocative biography. Hadda pointedly employs variants of his name (Bashevis, Yitskhok or Itshele) as a way of teasing out the sometimes contradictory aspects of his “bifurcated existence,” his “Yiddish self and his American persona, his Warsaw milieu and his New York environment.”

Singer is the ideal subject for a literary biography with a psychoanalytical edge. Hadda shows how his sensibilities as a writer were formed (and perhaps deformed) by an unsettled childhood in a colorful but dysfunctional family in which mother and father seemed to exchange traditional roles and left the children to fend for themselves.

His big brother was a crucial influence on young Singer--”his mentor, literary role model, the one whose example he imitated”--and so was his older sister, Hinde Esther, a passionate but troubled young woman. All three siblings wrote books of their own, but Isaac Bashevis Singer was destined to become the greatest writer of them all.

Hadda traces these childhood influences and experiences through the rich and memorable writing of Singer, and she shows how he reinvented himself and refashioned even his darkest memories into a literature that is both sentimental and ironic, glowing with nostalgia and yet shadowed by bitterness and sorrow. As Hadda points out, Singer managed to boost himself out of the Yiddish newspapers where his work was first serialized and reach an audience that included the readers of both the New Yorker and Playboy by subtly manipulating the words and images of his Yiddish-language texts.

“Along the way, Bashevis, that sharp-witted, conflicted, sometimes harsh literary genius, would gradually yield to Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Hadda writes, “the quaint, pigeon-feeding vegetarian, the serene and gentle embodiment of timeless Eastern-European-Jewish values.”

Indeed, Hadda insists on pointing out how the flesh-and-blood Singer differed from the celebrated storyteller.

She quotes Saul Bellow, an early translator of Singer’s work with whom the writer later feuded, on the occasion of Singer’s long-awaited Nobel Prize, when it was reported that the famous vegetarian writer was served an avocado from Israel at the festivities in Stockholm: “He may have been on a green diet,” the embittered Bellow cracked, “but he hadn’t stopped drinking blood.”

Hadda is no hero-worshiper, and she brings to her book the penetrating insight of an analyst and the insistent truth-telling of a scholar. She discerns in Singer’s literary stance a certain “chicanery,” and, at times, she finds herself in sympathy with those who condemned him as “manipulative, nasty, opportunistic and cynical.” But she confesses that she was won over by the master himself during a lecture appearance at UCLA when he turned to her for help in organizing his scattered lecture notes as an audience waited for him to take the podium--a scene right out of a Singer story.

“Bashevis looked at me with the expression of that helpless little boy he had so often described in his stories . . . , the little boy I was prepared to dismiss as a fake,” she recalls. “I now understood that Bashevis was both sharp and naive, that he could be both cruel and charming. But he had falsified neither his characters nor his culture.”

Hadda honors Isaac Bashevis Singer at the very same time that she draws a bright line between myth and reality in his life and work.