Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  He added: “I’m convinced that when I come to the other world, Rashi will be there to welcome me.”

  Father would only speak of himself so highly when he’d had a drop to drink. It seems to me that this was the first time that I, his son, felt the urge to become a writer.

  Now Father confided to me that since he was already in Warsaw, he would try to publish his “Righteousness of Rashi,” as he had entitled his manuscript. Since Joshua had gotten his job with the Forward, he had been sending money home every month and Father might have managed to save up a couple hundred zlotys. Still, he now had to pay the doctors, and he hardly had enough to publish the book. He had apparently also forgotten that the number of Talmudic scholars and yeshivah students was declining. The Orthodoxy of Warsaw had involved itself deeply in politics and now issued a newspaper and held conferences and congresses. True, these were politics of religion, but still they had acquired the jargon and style of worldly politics. The Orthodox no longer wanted to send their children to dingy cheders and yeshivahs, but instead built schools and academies complete with all the modern conveniences. The Beth Jacob schools for girls had also evolved, which was a novelty in Jewish religious history. Like all other parties, the Orthodoxy needed funds—huge sums to meet budgets. Father didn’t understand the new ways. Why couldn’t the teachers go on teaching children at home as they did for generations? Why couldn’t a youth who wished to learn simply go into a study house, take a Gemara down from the shelf, and study? And whoever heard of teaching the Torah to girls? Father feared that this was all the work of Satan.

  I strolled with him along Franciszkanska Street and we gazed into the windows of the religious bookstores. They were nearly all deserted. The Torah had fallen out of fashion. Who needed so many commentaries, interpretations, exegeses, books of sermons and morals? Who needed justifications for questions posed to Rashi by the tosaphists? Besides, other authors had already answered them. Father was fully aware that his sons, Israel Joshua and I, had become involved with worldly literature. My brother had published several books and my name too had appeared occasionally in a literary magazine or even a newspaper. But Father wouldn’t speak of this and it seems to me that he didn’t even allow himself to think about it. Father held that all enlightened books regardless whether in Hebrew or in Yiddish, were deadly poison for the soul. The writers were a gang of clowns, lechers, scoundrels. What shame and mortification he felt for producing such offspring from his loins! Father put all the blame on Mother, the daughter of a misnagid, an anti-Hasid. It was she who had planted the seeds of doubt, of heresy, within us. Father had one consolation—that we hadn’t grown up ignoramuses. We had studied the Torah, and whoever once tasted the flavor of Torah could never again forget that there is a God.

  At times, Father made a mistake and stopped before the window of a secular bookstore. They featured such works as Crime and Punishment, The Polish Boy, Anna Karenina, The Dangers of Onanism, The Jewish Colonization of Palestine, The Role of the Woman in Modern Society, The History of Socialism, Nana. Some of the book jackets displayed pictures of half-naked females. Father shrugged his shoulders and I could read his thoughts. That Gentiles should surrender to such trash was understandable. They had been and still remained idolators. But Jews? …

  Father didn’t recognize Warsaw. Here came a long column of boys identically dressed in green tunics and short pants displaying bare calves. They carried long poles and wore caps with the emblem of the Star of David. They were followed by girls in short dresses also revealing naked calves. They all sang. These weren’t Gentile children but Jewish boys and girls singing in Hebrew.

  “Who are they? What do they want?” Father asked in amazement. I explained that these were youths seeking to emigrate to Palestine.

  Father gripped his beard. “To Palestine? Why are they holding sticks? Do they mean to hit somebody?”

  I told him that they had dedicated themselves to sports or perhaps the sticks were meant to simulate rifles.

  “What? They want to fight wars? With whom? And how can Jews fight wars? We are like lambs surrounded by wolves.”

  “How long can we go on being lambs?”

  “What do you mean—how long? Until the Messiah comes.”

  “Jews are tired of waiting.”

  “Those that grow tired aren’t Jews. ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew strength.’ ”

  We passed a Kiosk featuring a poster which read in large Yiddish letters: “His Wife’s Husband, an operetta from America.” Father stopped.

  “What is this?”

  “Theater.”

  “Well, well, well. Everything the Mishnah predicted has come true. High time the redemption came, high time. That which we are seeing are the pangs preceding the deliverance.”

  We strolled for a long time in silence. We had emerged onto Nalewki Street and passed the prison on Dluga Street, the Arsenal, as it was called. Outside, convicts swept the gutter watched by an armed guard. The inmates had yellow complexions, yellow-gray uniforms, and even the prison walls were of the same dingy dun color. One convict leaned on his broom and studied Father and me with a half-bemused, half-amused expression, his eyes two laughing slits. I imagined that this was no living person but a corpse which instead of being buried had been thrown into jail, and it now laughed at this blunder committed by the living.

  “Father, what does God want?”

  Father stopped.

  “He wants us to serve Him and love Him with all our hearts and souls.”

  “How does He deserve this love?” I asked.

  Father thought it over a moment.

  “Everything man loves was created by the Almighty. Even the heretics love God. If a fruit is good and you love it, then you love the Creator of this fruit since He invested it with all its flavor. And if someone is a lecher and lusts for females, it was the Creator who bestowed them with their beauty and allure. The sage recognizes the source of all the good things and he loves that source. When the fruit rots, you no longer love it, and when the woman grows old and sickly, the lecher runs from her. The fool will not give any thought to where everything stems from.”

  “What about the evil things? What is their source?”

  “There are no evil things. Death which man fears most is a great joy and a blessing to the just.”

  “What about suffering?”

  Father was silent a long time and I assumed that he hadn’t heard me, but then he said: “That is the greatest secret of all. Even the saints weren’t able to fathom it. So long as man suffers he cannot solve the riddle of suffering. Even Job didn’t arrive at the answer. Moses himself didn’t know it. The truth is that body and pain are synonyms. How could there be free choice without punishment for choosing evil and reward for choosing what is right? Behind all this suffering is God’s infinite mercy.”

  Father paused and then asked: “Is there a house of worship in the neighborhood? Time to say the afternoon prayers.”

  Six

  1

  The summer had passed but Gina still didn’t return to Warsaw. The secret was out—Gina was both consumptive and anemic. The doctors felt that she would be better off in a sanitarium but Gina didn’t want to nor could she afford to enter a sanitarium. She had rented a room outside of Otwock, in the woods and away from all neighbors. When I came to visit her there, she told me frankly that she wanted to isolate herself from people and all their affairs. She had come there to die. She had given up her apartment on Gesia Street for which she had received a few thousand zlotys for surrendering the lease. Gina had estimated that she could exist on fifteen zlotys a week. She belonged to a Sick Fund which provided her medicines free. I had helped her move her books, occult magazines, and the few other necessary possessions to Otwock.

  My fear of the draft had been removed—I had been rejected for military service. The doctors had found my lungs not in the best of order and Pilsudski had admonished the army to conscript no more weak young men. Rumors circulated that the col
onels who now ruled Poland weren’t too eager to have too many Jews in the army since many of them were leftists. The leaders of the Polish parties—the NDK, the PPS, and the Peasant party—complained that Poland had become a dictatorship. Pilsudski ordered the arrest of Witos, Lieberman, and a number of others of his opponents and he made them stand trial. For some strange reason, the editor of the Yiddish newspaper Der Heint sent me to cover this trial and to write my impressions of it from the standpoint of a literary observer. This had been arranged by my brother, who since obtaining his position with the Forward had proven himself an exceptionally able journalist. The reports that he published in the Forward under the pseudonym of G. Kupfer (his wife’s maiden name was Genia Kupferstok) became famous among Yiddish readers in both America and Poland, where they were frequently reprinted.

  I myself nursed ambitions to be a journalist and this assignment was a stroke of luck for me. I was issued a press card by my newspaper and was seated in the courtroom among the journalists facing the accused, who only a brief time before had been ministers of the Polish Government. I felt more frightened here than the accused. The chamber was small and it seemed to me that these well-known political figures gazed at me with mockery. The journalists ignored me. The court proceedings dragged along. They consisted of lengthy, boring readings of charges that no one took seriously. Although I needed both the money and the prestige this assignment offered, I decided one day that it wasn’t for me. My brother was a bit disappointed that I was tossing aside such a good opportunity, but he left the decision to me. Politics was not my game.

  Nothing had come of Father’s plans to publish his manuscript. Dr. Frankel had written one or two prescriptions for Father but from Mother’s letter I gathered that they hadn’t helped. Father wrote curt notes but Mother’s letters were longer. With my younger brother, Moishe, Father was studying such volumes as The Teacher of Knowledge and The Breastplate of Judgment, and it looked as if—after Father’s demise—Moishe would take over his post. It was therefore necessary that he be married, since pious Jews like the Belz Chassidim wouldn’t accept a bachelor rabbi. But it wasn’t easy to find a match for Moishe. He was too pious. He had isolated himself completely from the world. He hadn’t an inkling about business or about any other worldly matters. He shouted during prayer, clapped his hands, sang the chants of Nachman the Bratzlav Rabbi, went into religious ecstasy. Describing Moishe to me, Father called him a saint. He said that compared to Moishe, he, Father, was a sinner. But the Galician girls who had nearly all attended Gymnasium and read newspapers and Polish novels weren’t too keen about a youth who at nineteen wore a wild beard and earlocks dangling to the shoulders, a gaberdine to the ankles, an unbuttoned shirt, and old-fashioned slippers. Moishe was tall, even taller than my brother Joshua; blond; with a rare white skin, big blue eyes, and well-formed limbs. He looked like the image of Jesus Christian artists had created. The Gentiles in Father’s town considered Moishe a holy man and that’s what he actually was. Had there existed such an institution as a Jewish monastery, Moishe would have surely become a monk. The danger was that Moishe might remain without a job.

  In the letters my parents wrote me, they kept wishing me, to get married, but I was no better suited to be a husband than was Moishe. Like Moishe, I neglected my appearance. So long as Gina was around she kept an eye on me, sewed on my buttons, darned my socks, even washed out my shirts and drawers. She referred to me good-naturedly as a scatterbrain. She would complain: “What’s the point of fantasizing? You, my little colt, won’t change the world. Since God plays hide-and-seek, you’ll never find Him.”

  Now that Gina had departed Warsaw, I went about messy and buttonless, with torn shoes, I went days without shaving. My hair had started to fall out. The stiff collars I wore were either too tight or too loose.

  I was still seeking some means with which to penetrate the barrier of the categories of pure reason, to comprehend the thing in itself and to find a basis for ethics. I still rummaged through libraries and bookstores in the hope of encountering some proof as to the existence of a soul, of an astral body, of some remnant that lingered after the heart stopped beating and the brain stopped functioning. I had read a lot of occult literature but more and more I kept hearing how mediums were being caught in swindles. Books came out detailing how professional spiritists duped their victims. I had already heard about Houdini stripping the masks from a number of famous mediums who had made ectoplasm out of cheesecloth, fabricated phony photographs of ghosts, used cheap tricks to fool such serious scholars and psychical researchers as Flammarion, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, and many others who desperately clutched for every scrap of evidence of the immortality of the soul. I often had the feeling that sooner or later the truth would reveal itself to me if only I didn’t cease groping and hoping. My literary work, my interest in the epoch of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, had driven me to search for volumes that described various miracles and wonders of nature. My own nervousness gave me lessons in the power of hysteria and in the force of autosuggestion, or self-hypnosis. My inner enemy constantly pressed me and I had to keep formulating ever new strategies to overcome him or at least keep him temporarily at bay. I had begun glancing into the works of Freud, Jung, Adler. If I found less information there than did others, it was only because our own moralists and authors of Chassidic volumes had been keen students of man and had in simple terms revealed the deepest conflicts existent within the human soul. They knew all the symptoms of hysteria and the whole schism of the spirit. Man had to maintain watch over himself all the time since every second posed a danger. The pit of crime and insanity yawned beneath us constantly. The Evil Spirit never grew weary of assailing us with theories, conjectures, half-truths, fears, fantasies, and illusions of pleasures intended to eradicate the greatest gift God had given us—free will. In all the centuries that the Gentiles had waged wars against each other the Ghetto Jew had waged a war with his inner enemy, with that power of Evil that roosts in every brain and constantly strives to lead it astray. The Emancipation had partially (or gradually) put an end to this Jewish war. The Enlightened Jew had himself become a bit of the Evil Spirit thanks to his experience of wrangling with him. He had become a master of specious theories, of perverse truths, of seductive utopias, of false remedies. Since the Gentile world needed its idols, the modern Jew had emerged to provide new ones. He grew so absorbed in this business of idolatry that he came to believe it himself and even sacrificed himself to it.

  2

  I had chosen but two idols that I would be willing to serve: the idol of literature and the idol of love, but many of my colleagues both in and out of the Writers’ Club invariably served the idol of World Betterment. They hammered away at me: How can one be a writer if one isn’t ready to fight for a better world, equality, freedom, justice, a world without competition and of eternal peace? The capitalist countries fought wars on account of oil. They kept putting up new munitions factories. The strongest among them seized huge areas of the earth. Within the groups, some individuals seized all the power under the guise of democracy while they preached offering the other cheek. How could an honest and sensitive person witness all this and still keep silent?

  Well, but terrible tidings emerged from the land of socialism.

  Isaac Deutscher, who had become a Trotskyite, revealed many Stalinist outrages in his little magazine—the slave camps, the liquidation of the Bolsheviks, the rigged trials and purges which had already taken the lives of millions of innocent people. Was this socialism? Was this the ideal postulated by Marx, Engels, Lenin? Deutscher had overwhelming proof that Leon Trotsky would have handled things differently. I attended a meeting at the Writers’ Club at which this Isaac Deutscher was the speaker. The Stalinists tried to outshout him. They called him the renegade, fascist, sellout, capitalist bootlicker, imperialist murderer, provocateur. But Deutscher had a powerful voice. He pounded his fist on the podium and his audience of Trotskyites encouraged him with thunderous applause. He hu
rled sulphur and ashes at Stalinists and right-wing Socialists, at Fascists, and at such alleged democracies as America, England, and France.

  Within the Jewish circles, he castigated the Zionists in all their factions and variations. What madness to want to turn back the clock of history two thousand years! Well, and why had the Zionists concluded that Palestine belonged to the Jews? They gleaned all their information from the Scriptures, a book filled with miracles and legends. Deutscher said that the fact that Zionism could attract millions of Jews merely demonstrated the degeneracy and hopelessness of the bourgeoisie.

  Among those who came to the lecture were Sabina and her younger brother, Mottel. Although Sabina was leftist-oriented, she hadn’t yet decided whether she was a Stalinist, a Trotskyite, or an anarchist. Mottel was a fervent Stalinist and he had come to heckle and maybe even throw a rotten potato or egg at the speaker. Mottel was short and broad-shouldered, with thick lips, a broad nose like a duck’s (he actually was nicknamed Mottel Duck), and small, piercing eyes under bushy brows. Mottel was something of a buffoon. He spouted jokes, and absurdities that evoked laughter. He had a low forehead and a thatch of pitch-black, curly hair. Mottel Duck had already served time at the Pawiak prison for his Communist activities. His sister told me that he carried a gun. He allowed his sister and mother to support him. He ran around with rich girls who were drawn to communism and he took money from them, allegedly for party causes. He was a big eater and able to quaff numerous mugs of beer and sleep fourteen hours at a stretch.

  Sabina frequently complained to me: “How it happened that such a child should come out of our pious family is something I’ll never understand. Unless he is a bastard.”