The Gone World

“The door opened and into the room came” . . . everyone. A wife seeking to leave her husband because he’d gambled away their stove. A serious young man wanting to know if it was permissible to marry a prostitute. A loving couple, married for 40 years but asking for a divorce so the husband could go to the Holy Land. Raging, crying, pleading, an entire universe eventually crammed its way into a small apartment on Warsaw’s Krochmalna Street, where a rabbi tried to sort everything out and a small boy listened.

The rabbi didn’t have the permit necessary to be an official rabbi in pre-World War I Poland, but because he was upright, trusting and rarely took offense, his beth din, or rabbinical court, did not lack for patrons. The beth din was “a kind of blend of a court of law, synagogue, house of study, and, if you will, psychoanalyst’s office where people of troubled spirit could come to unburden themselves.” The small boy who wrote that, once he’d grown up, was Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, died in 1991 but, like a Yiddish-language Louis L’Amour, he left behind much unpublished material. “More Stories From My Father’s Court,” Singer’s fifth posthumous publication, speaks of human need, human connivance and, Singer’s perennial preoccupation, “the strangeness of human relationships.”

The title here refers to a much earlier book, 1966’s “In My Father’s Court,” a collection of brief tales originally written as columns for the Yiddish-language Daily Forward newspaper. Singer, who published them under his Isaac Warshawsky pseudonym, considered these “a literary experiment, an attempt to combine two styles, that of memoirs and that of belles-lettres.” He also combined two points of view, that of the small boy he was then and the sophisticated writer he became.

Singer’s storylines involve everything from a convert more pious than the most pious Jews to a “toom-toom,” a non-virile man, who wants to get married (and to a rabbi’s widow, no less). Singer also had such an unparalleled ability to bring to life this lost civilization, in which couples “would go out to the street when they wanted to fight and wait for a crowd to gather,” that the Lawrence Ferlinghetti title, “Pictures of the Gone World,” might fit this collection as well.

It was a world in which modernity intersected with tradition. Telephones and movies were facts of life, and people sang songs about the Titanic, but putting the heated lid of a pot on your stomach was still considered the appropriate remedy for pain and pious people literally trembled should they happen to mention God’s name. Relationship problems, intricate in their specificity but universal at their core, were what people brought to Rabbi Singer’s beth din. And reading about them filtered through the author’s natural sense of drama has, in addition to everything else, something of the appeal that gets people reading “Dear Abby” and listening to talk radio in our nominally more sophisticated times.

Trying to make sense of it all was the rabbi, a man of fine moral sensibilities who was so pious he followed the Talmudic stricture of never looking directly at women. Though his own wife, the novelist’s mother, was sharp-tongued and skeptical, the rabbi believed absolutely in Jewish law as codified in the numerous books in his study. More than once his son records his bringing “the holy book he was studying closer to him, as if to hide his face from the world and from its lusts and temptations.”

Reading these stories, it’s easy to see how critical it was to Singer to mature in this kind of highly dramatic setting, where everything he saw inflamed both his writer’s imagination and a parallel curiosity about human behavior. “I stood behind my father’s chair and listened,” he says at one point, “I was transformed into one big ear,” he comments at another, absorbing not only raw material but also a sensibility that valued the vagaries of the human condition.

But though young Isaac was fascinated, his father was often overwhelmed by the impiety and dishonesty of the people who appeared before him. “It’s high time,” he’d say to his colleagues, “for the Messiah to come.” Both the author and his readers knew all too well what the Jews of Eastern Europe got instead.