An outsider’s outsider

His penetrating blue eyes widened in disbelief. It was 1976, two years before his epochal Nobel Prize for Literature, and Isaac Bashevis Singer looked frankly skeptical when a young Washington Post reporter hinted at his growing celebrity.

“I don’t even think that I am famous now, but if you say so, who am I to say no,” Singer told me. He punctuated his lilting, accented English with the most elegant of shrugs before adding the coup de grace: “Today, to be famous, you have to be a Frank Sinatra.”

In 2004, things are different, even by Sinatra standards. It’s the 100th anniversary of Singer’s birth and a Caribbean cruise, an official website and celebratory literary events in Los Angeles and New York (as well as St. Cloud, Minn., Moscow, Idaho, and Brigham City, Utah) are planned.

The centennial’s centerpiece is a three-volume Library of America collection of more than 200 of Singer’s short stories, weighing in at nearly 2,600 pages. For the first time in its 22-year history, the publisher also is issuing a handsomely illustrated biographical guide to a writer’s life and work, “Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album.” Eat your heart out, Henry James.

This kind of fuss may seem inevitable for only the seventh American to win the Nobel. If you didn’t look too hard, Singer, by the time of his death in 1991, had become a beloved and respected figure on the U.S. cultural landscape, despite having written all his stories in the glorious yet moribund language of European Jews, Yiddish.

The first writer elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences to use another language, he led the New Yorker to break its anti-translation policy, shared the 1974 National Book Award with Thomas Pynchon, had streets named after him in New York and Florida and got one of his eight honorary doctorates from Texas Christian University. He wrote a string of children’s books and won a coveted Newbery honor. What’s not to like?

Quite a lot for some people. Singer’s works at one time were banned from Israel’s religious schools because “his values do not conform,” yet he was asked to lecture West Point cadets about freedom. For every person like venerable Jewish American author Anzia Yezierska who considered Singer “the last of the great Yiddish fiction writers” there were those like Inna Grade, widow of novelist Chaim Grade, who recently told the New York Times: “I profoundly despise him. I am very sorry that America is celebrating the blasphemous buffoon.” As Singer put it to me, “They looked at me really as a strange kind of plant, until today they don’t know what to do with me.”

What is indisputable is that he was considerably more complex and improbable than the facile figure being celebrated. For though Singer was translated into dozens of languages and accepted as perhaps the quintessential Jewish writer, he was both of the tradition and apart from it, a man whose contradictions belied his one-size-pleases-all image. This collection lets us re-examine him on a deeper, more sustained level, to experience his mastery and appreciate the powerful forces that shaped him and made his multiple transformations and personal reinventions not only possible but essential.

The story of Singer’s metamorphosis from blocked, despairing immigrant to literary wonder rabbi is as unexpected and marvelous as the tales of dybbuks and demons that fill his pages. Given how long his celebrity was in coming, how many personal, professional and cultural obstacles he overcame, it’s no wonder he had difficulty believing he was headed for the Sinatra side of the street.

The new books also allowed me to explore my connections with Singer, which began before that interview in his high-ceilinged apartment on New York’s Upper West Side and extended, in a fashion he would have appreciated, after his death. Because his transformations, his American journeys, have to a certain extent paralleled and echoed my father’s, even my own.

Though he was born and began writing in Poland, it was America that first unmade, then made Singer, a country that simultaneously fascinated, attracted and repulsed him, gave him the freedom to write as he pleased and the wide audience that made that freedom sweet, but not immediately and not without costs.

Singer was astoundingly prolific. These stories come from 12 free-standing volumes as well as a group of translated tales that were never published in book form. This would be impressive if he were only a short story writer, but a baker’s dozen novels also were published in English under his name, as were numerous volumes of memoir and 14 children’s books. Bibliographers estimate that his untranslated works exceed 4,000 pieces, including 11 novels, an equal number of novellas and a considerable amount of journalism. Because he also used at least six pseudonyms in Yiddish periodicals in New York, Paris, Warsaw and who knows where else, it is “unlikely that there will ever be a comprehensive list of all his contributions,” writes editor Ilan Stavans.

Singer was a Yiddish Scheherazade, a spinner of tales who could have handled 1,001 nights without breathing hard, a writer who made everything seem new, alive. His images are taut (“curses tumbled from her mouth as from a torn sack”); he rarely resorts to elaborate words or writerly flourishes. His gift, so casual it could be discounted, was for convincing creation. It’s as if he had a private window on the time/space continuum, that he was witnessing happenings in an alternate universe, not making them up. His language was straightforward, but his insights into character and motivation, his understanding of human behavior, went as deep as any sage’s.

Singer called the short story a writer’s “utmost challenge.... [U]nlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy digressions, flashbacks and loose construction, [it] must aim directly at its climax. It must possess uninterrupted tension and suspense. Also, brevity is its very essence.” In many works -- from his signature tale “Gimpel the Fool” to classics like “A Crown of Feathers” to undervalued jewels like “A Nest Egg For Paradise” -- he achieved breathtaking perfection.

His tales were intertwined with the ebb and flow of his personal life and the violent caprices of 20th-century Jewish existence. Perhaps the intensity of their early experiences and the wide emotional gap between their parents led him, older brother Israel Joshua Singer and sister Esther Kreitman to become significant writers.

Though Singer joked to me that “like every Englishman has a lord in his family, so has every Jew a rabbi,” his experience was different than most. Both grandfathers were rabbis but of completely different strains: His father’s father came from a line of ecstatic Hasidic rabbis, while his mother’s father was a misnagid, a fierce rationalistic opponent of Hasidism. His father was an unlicensed rabbi, mild, pious and unworldly; his mother, Batsheva, was skeptical and sharp-tongued. In an unpublished memoir, Esther’s son Maurice Carr remembers his grandmother as being “a preternatural blend of ruthless scorn and heartbreaking self-pity that beggars imagination.” It was Bashevis, a variant of her name, that Singer took as a pseudonym when he began to write.

From age 4 to 13, he lived on Warsaw’s Krochmalna Street, a poor neighborhood favored by criminals and prostitutes. People raging, crying, pleading -- a crash course in humanity -- crammed their way into the Singer apartment looking for rabbinical judgment. Singer, often hiding behind his father’s chair, took it all in.

Then, at 13, his life changed abruptly. For four years during World War I, he lived in Bilgoray, a shtetl where, he later wrote, “the kind of Jewish behavior and customs I witnessed were those preserved from a much earlier time. ... I had a chance to see our past as it really was. Time seemed to flow backwards. I lived Jewish history.”

The potency of these contrasting experiences mark Singer’s short fiction, starting with his intimate, detailed knowledge of the vanished worlds in which he set his stories. Unfolding in tiny Jewish enclaves with names like Turbin, Letshin, Shebrin, Betchow and Ishishok, Singer’s narratives are so thick with incident and cultural information you could almost drown in them. These are stories with blood in their veins, stories that flood the senses as they soak themselves in Jewish law and folklore, mysticism and superstition, secrets and lies.

Clamoring for breathing space in this crammed world are apostates and abandoned wives, prodigies and converts, thieves, prostitutes and wonder rabbis who “warred constantly with the evil ones.” Only a writer with a vision of the inexhaustible variety of human experience could take us from a Satanic black wedding where “twelve-year-old boys were mated with ‘spinsters’ of nineteen, midgets were coupled with giants, beauties with cripples,” to pious rabbis who order that a cat have socklets put on its feet on Passover eve “lest it bring into the house the smallest crumb of unleavened bread.”

Mixed with Singer’s impeccable realism was its nominal opposite, a tendency enhanced by his Bilgoray experiences to treat the supernatural as everyday and the everyday as a mystery. He believed we lived in close proximity to yenne velt, a world where goblins, imps and devils set traps for unwary humans. His realistic stories were often narrated by these demons so familiar they were known by name -- Asmodeus, Lilith, Machlalth, Ketev Mriri, even Satan. To put it bluntly, Singer saw dead people, and he saw them everywhere.

Following in his brother’s footsteps, Singer became something of a boy wonder writer in Warsaw, publishing his first story at 21. His writings from that period have yet to be translated, except for his marvelous first novel, “Satan in Goray,” published in 1935. That same year, he followed his brother to New York. “I foresaw there will be nothing good in Poland,” Singer told me. “I knew that the evil ones are not satisfied with talk. They are more energetic, they want to act.”

What he did not foresee was the effect the Yiddish-averse United States would have in savaging his ability to create. For an uncannily biblical seven lean years he produced no fiction, supporting himself through journalism, translation and criticism. He considered himself an anachronism and felt “unknown as only a Yiddish writer can be.” As he wrote years later, “not only was I cut off from my language but I also felt my way of thinking, my notions and my concepts, had been distorted.” Perhaps most telling, he married a German Jewish woman who did not speak Yiddish. “When you are in a strange environment,” Singer said, lapsing into another shrug. “Only dilettantes go to Spain for four weeks and come back with a novel about Spain.”

Profoundly shocked and possibly freed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the unexpected death of his beloved older brother, Singer returned to fiction with a vengeance in the 1940s and ‘50s, which is when my father discovered him through the serialized novels, or romanen, Singer wrote for the Yiddish-language Daily Forward. That newspaper was as much a lifeline for the writer as for my father, Max Turan, born Mottel Turiansky, who, like Singer, was a Polish emigre whose family perished in the nightmare of the camps. One of my strongest childhood memories is the towering pile of chapters my father would stack in the living room for eventual reading. Heaven help any family member who dared move the papers or, God forbid, get them out of order.

From then on, Singer’s short stories presented people haunted not only by devils but also by the demons of uncontrollable sexuality. In his world, holy men are troubled by desire, animals lust after women and, in the compelling “Blood,” a woman hungers for a ritual slaughterer so much that “the cutting of throats and the shedding of blood soon became so mixed with carnal desire that she hardly knew where one began and the other ended.”

This wasn’t exactly what the Yiddish literary establishment wanted to read, especially given the understandable post-Holocaust attempt to sanctify Eastern European Jewry. Singer could not have cared less. “Mostly he had contempt for the whole Yiddish literary tradition,” critic Morris Dickstein writes in the companion guide. “He saw himself as reaching back to earlier Jewish traditions and away from Yiddish traditions he saw as polluted by socialism and sentimentality.”

Singer’s love affair with U.S. audiences began with the appearance of “Gimpel the Fool” in the May-June 1953 issue of Partisan Review. The story of a fool who looks back on his life and finally dares us to consider it foolish, “Gimpel” was his first short work to appear in English after 18 years in this country; it was translated by another future Nobel Prize winner, Saul Bellow, who, so the story goes, sat at a typewriter over a long afternoon as the tale was dictated to him in Yiddish.

Perhaps out of a fear of being overshadowed, Singer never used Bellow as a translator again. Editor Stavans says 17 translators were used, but the process was unusual because they often did not speak Yiddish. Singer, who came to consider English “my second original language,” at times used them only to polish his English-language drafts, which, Yiddish readers have often said, were as much canny revisions for a new American audience as literal translations.

From “Gimpel” onward, his success inflamed resentment against him in the Yiddish world, as Cynthia Ozick captures brilliantly in her tart novella “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” In it, poet Edelshtein is consumed with fury because fellow Yiddish writer Yankel Ostrover (clearly Singer, given the “insanely sexual, pornographic, paranoid, freakish” subject matter) had scaled the wall. “They considered him a ‘modern,’ ” Edelshtein seethes. “Ostrover was free of the prison of Yiddish! Out, out -- he had burst out, he was in the world of reality.”

But the very things that alienated traditionalists, that the Yiddishists found objectionable, were particularly suited to American readers, making it easier, even natural, for the children and grandchildren of Singer’s original immigrant audience, readers like me, to embrace the man and his work.

For Jews and others unsure how they connected to the continuum of thousands of years of cultural and religious tradition, Singer provided a much-needed haven. He was a despairing modernist in traditional form, someone who could simultaneously tell a great story and deal with philosophical questions about the purpose of life, the power of evil, the futility of human endeavor, the notion that “God’s face is forever hidden,” and do it all in a rich, imaginative and quintessentially Jewish milieu.

Singer was never sentimental and rarely romantic; his most affecting love stories, including “The Spinoza of Market Street,” “Short Friday” and “Sam Palka and David Vishkover” concern people who are quite old and facing death or insuperable obstacles. At a time when science and rationalism had led us to the edge of extinction, there was an interest in stories that thrust us into a world where other forces held sway, where actions were beyond simple, logical explanations.

All but three stories in the first Library of America volume are set in Eastern Europe; the balance gradually shifts in the second and third books as Singer not only increasingly set his stories in this country but also began to change their focus and form. The Eastern European stories are mostly told in the third person, narrated by a fictional character or even one of Satan’s host. The Diaspora stories are increasingly told in a first person likely to be a thinly disguised version of the author. Rather than talk about imps and devils, who, he once wrote, felt ill at ease in an America without old-fashioned stoves to hide behind, Singer focused on “the mysterious powers”: telepathy, clairvoyance, premonition, the ability to communicate with the dead.

Singer did not spare his alter ego. In “The Son,” his gloss on the New York reunion with a child from a Warsaw relationship whom he had not seen in decades, he is pitiless about his lack of parental feeling. “I had no room for him, no bed, no money, no time” he writes. “What is a son after all? ... If one cannot love everybody, one should not love anybody.”

The only real people in Singer’s life were his characters. For a man of so many contradictions, this modern traditionalist, part satyr, part children’s author, was a writer above anything else, with all the selfishness and self-absorption that can imply.

Perhaps Singer was so unyieldingly committed to his work because it was the only thing that wouldn’t let him down, the only power he felt could protect him from forces that had haunted him since childhood. One of my strongest memories of my time with Singer was the start he gave when he opened his apartment door in 1976 and saw my long hair and somewhat unruly appearance. It was a look I recognized at once, a look of fear.

I’d seen it all my life, in my old-country parents, my refugee aunts and uncles. It was the timid, uncertain look of people whose world had come apart, fated always to anticipate the worst, never to feel secure or fully at home in the goldene medine, the golden land where they had taken uncertain refuge. Singer was a writer of genius but he would always be the outsider, the stranger in America, the man who was terrorized by everything in New York. Just like my father. Just like, at times, me.

Singer and I, as it turned out, were not yet finished. When the National Yiddish Book Center began a Yiddish Writers Garden at its headquarters in Amherst, Mass., a few years ago, I sponsored the bilingual plaque dedicated to Bashevis. I did it with my wife in memory of my Eastern European and her Montana parents, who never met and, as representatives of two mightily different cultures and religions, might not have had much to say to each other if they had. It said something about America that we both wanted to make such a gesture, and in its unexpectedness, its move toward unity and acceptance beyond the grave, it seemed like something Singer would have appreciated. At least I’d like to think so. *