Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  I had resolved repeatedly and warned myself not to have anything more to do with this Sabina, but I did the opposite. My earnings were so meager that I could no longer pay for my room at the eye doctor’s on Zamenhof Street and Miss Sabina proposed that I move in with her family. A room had become vacant in their apartment and the rent was half of what I was now paying. Sabina’s mother would serve me lunches cheaply. We had already kissed and I knew that once I moved into her house she would become my mistress.

  This Sabina didn’t speak of romantic love as had Gina or Stefa. Sabina had read the works of such modernists as Margueritte, Decobra, Zapolska, and she had a high opinion of Emma Goldman. She often derided the institution of marriage as antiquated and held that the man of the future wouldn’t make contracts for lifelong love but would conduct himself according to the dictates of nature. Sabina had read some of my stories and she believed in my literary powers if I could only find the right direction.

  Sabina spoke to me frankly. A young man was after her, ready to marry her, but the little love she had felt for him before had completely cooled within her. He wrote poems in Polish. He came from some town in the Lublin region. He had dropped out of the Gymnasium and gone off to Palestine where he had struggled for two years, suffered from malaria, and come back a dedicated Communist. He had been arrested twice. She couldn’t drop him all at once since he was madly in love with her and was, despite his Leninist convictions, capable of killing himself. But if I moved in with her, sooner or later he would remove himself. There was even a chance he might smuggle himself into Soviet Russia or be sent there by the Party.

  When Mrs. Alpert heard that I was giving up the room, she fell into a kind of panic. She was ready to keep me on without paying rent, she claimed. Her eyes filled with tears. She told me that I was the best boarder she had ever had. She thought of me as a son. To her, a boarder wasn’t someone who merely paid his rent—she had to feel a rapport toward someone with whom she shared a roof. My name had been mentioned in a Polish-Jewish newspaper she read and it was an honor for her to have such a person in her home. How could I treat her this way? Marila the maid also flushed, and turned sulky and tearful when she heard I was moving out.

  She complained to me: “What bad did we ever do you that you’re running away from us? I always kept your room spotless, not even a speck of dirt. When you wanted tea or whatever, I was ready to get up in the middle of the night to serve you. I took care of your phone calls and all your dates. You’re obviously drawn to one of those fancy young ladies of yours, but none of them will be as faithful to you as I’ve been.”

  I listened to these reproofs in amazement. It had never occurred to me that I was such a catch. I wasn’t tall or handsome, and I spoke a poor Polish. Whenever I glanced in the mirror I always grew half frightened of my own face. The little hair left on my head was fiery red. My face was pale and often as white as that of someone who has just gotten up out of a sickbed. My cheeks were sunken, my ears flaring, my back stooped. Women constantly corrected my Polish, pointed out that my tie was crooked, that my trousers seemed about to fall off at any moment, and that my shoelaces were untied. I suffered from colds and no matter how many handkerchiefs I had, they were always soiled. I felt so touched by Mrs. Alpert’s and Marila’s reaction that I blurted: “Well, all right. I’ll stay with you, my dears!”

  In a second I decided to hold on to both rooms! This was pure nonsense since I didn’t earn enough to maintain even one room. But somehow I had the feeling that a God who tolerated my insanities wouldn’t forsake me.

  3

  When Sabina heard what I had done, she said that I wasn’t merely deranged but also suicidal. The most important thing for a young writer was to have a clear head, not to have to constantly fret about money. Well, and what would I do with two rooms? I didn’t have any possessions outside of my few books and manuscripts. I had nothing to move out and nothing to move in. The whole thing sounded like a bad joke. Sabina was ready to give me back the few zlotys I had given her as a deposit, but I wouldn’t hear of it. My only fear was that my brother shouldn’t find out what I was doing. He would have scolded me like a father. He would tell his fellow writers and they would have something to laugh at. Well, but I had already had two residences when Gina was still living in Warsaw. It seemed that my type of conspiracy required two addresses.

  I awaited a miracle and a miracle came. I walked into the Writers’ Club and the woman at the door told me that the editor of the afternoon paper, Radio, had telephoned me. He had left a number where I was supposed to call him right back. Had my brother again tried to get me a job? No, this time it wasn’t my brother but someone else who had told the editor of Radio that I had displayed a talent for writing. He had also mentioned that I could translate from the German. The Radio, like the other Yiddish newspapers, printed suspense novels. The editor had just acquired an exciting novel from Germany, where it had enjoyed a huge success. The problem was, however, that the Yiddish reader wouldn’t accept a novel with a locale as alien as Berlin with its strange-sounding streets. The novel didn’t have to be merely translated but adapted in such a way that the action was shifted to Warsaw and the heroes and heroines became familiar Jewish men and women.

  On the telephone the editor proposed this revision to me. He told me to come to his office and I didn’t walk but ran. I’ve forgotten his name, but his image is fixed in my mind—short, stout, with a round face, ruddy cheeks, and amiable, half-sleepy eyes. He was a favorite of the newspaper’s owner, perhaps a relative of the owner.

  He smiled at me with the geniality of one who wants to grant a favor and rid himself of a burden at the same time. He took a thick German book out of a drawer. It appeared to be a thousand pages long.

  He handed it to me and said: “Glance through it!”

  I read the first page and asked: “Will my name have to be used?”

  “No names.”

  “Oh, this is a stroke of luck for me!” I gushed, knowing the whole while that it is poor business to show how eager you are for a job. I came from a house which knew of no diplomacy.

  The editor said: “We’ll give you sixty zlotys a week.”

  In those days, sixty zlotys came to no more than eleven or twelve dollars, but in Poland this was a big sum. Whole families got by on such an amount.

  I said: “Really, I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Go home and get to work. You’ll supply us some ten thousand words a week. Write simply, in short paragraphs and with lots of dialogue. Don’t use any difficult words. If you need an advance, you can get one right now.”

  “As you understand …”

  “I understand that you can use it. If the novel catches on, you’ll get more work from us.”

  “I’ll do everything in my power.”

  He wrote out a slip of paper for me and showed me where to take it to a cashier, who handed me two hundred zlotys. I had been struggling along as a proofreader and translator and suddenly I had become rich, even if burdened down with work. Although I felt doubts about God, His benevolence and providence, I offered up silent praise to Him. No, the world was no accident, no result of an explosion or something similar, as Feuerbach, Marx, and Bukharin contended. Because I didn’t want to disappoint Mrs. Alpert and Marila, God had sent me this source of income. But why didn’t He reward deeds nobler than mine? Why did He allow poor people to jump from trolleys and lose arms and legs, or Gina to die of consumption, or innocent children to burn to death by falling kerosene stoves?

  Afterward, when I told a journalist at the Writers’ Club what had happened, he told me that I was a dunce. The editor was paying me half of what other writers of this kind of work were getting.

  “Why didn’t you bargain with him?” he asked me. He advised me to call the editor and demand more. He was willing to bet that he would raise me at least forty zlotys a week on the spot. But I was too proud to do something like that. I had been raised to believe that haggling and praising your own w
ork and asking for a raise after a deal had been made was beneath human dignity.

  4

  We sat around the table with Sabina, her mother, and her two brothers, and we ate dinner. Bryna Reizel, as Sabina’s mother was called, told stories of her hometown.

  I listened to every word. I had been disappointed in philosophy, I hardly believed in psychology, and not at all in sociology, but I had come to the conclusion that many truths or fragments of truth were buried in folklore, in dreams, and in fantasies. Where thought isn’t linked with any discipline, it’s able to catch a glimpse behind the curtain of the phenomenon. Bryna Reizel told of some Polish squire who following the failure of the 1863 uprising confined himself to a coffin where he ate, slept, read books, and lived for the next thirty years. When he died, they found inside his straw pallet a fortune in gold ducats and a will leaving his entire estate to an old lecher, a former lover of his, the squire’s, wife. She, the wife, had died twenty years earlier. Bryna Reizel spouted stories about dybbuks, werewolves, demons who celebrated weddings and circumcisions in attics and cellars, corpses who worshiped in synagogues at midnight and summoned frightened passers-by to join them.

  Bryna Reizel was past fifty and had suffered much grief, yet her face had remained youthful. The words slid out of her small mouth as if of their own volition and she used Yiddish idioms I had not heard for a long time or only encountered in old storybooks. Sabina and her brother Mottel winked to each other and at times even laughed at their mother. They didn’t believe in such nonsense, but I and Bryna Reizel’s younger son, Haskele, listened. Haskele suffered from scrofula. He had a large head, “water on the brain.” He had been taken from cheder at an early age and hadn’t been able to get a job with an artisan. He did a girl’s tasks around the house—ran errands, heated the oven, swept, and at times even washed the dishes. His eyes were whitish and unevenly set. Sabina and Mottle reminded me at every opportunity that Haskele was a victim of capitalism.

  Winter came early that year. Soon after Succoth a deep snow fell and the frosts commenced. My worries about a living had ceased so long as the novel would run, but Sabina’s brother Mottel accused me of contributing to yellow journalism. He read each day’s installment and pointed out again and again that this was opium for the masses to lull them from the struggle for a just order.

  Sabina’s fiancé (as he was known in the house), Meir Milner, only sought to engage me in debates. He was blond, blue-eyed, snub-nosed. He worked a half-day as an assistant bookkeeper in a button factory. I had blurted out that I didn’t believe in historical materialism and he had promptly become my enemy. He kept on needling me. In what, he asked, did I believe? In the League of Nations that had immediately after its formation begun to expire? In Wilson’s hypocritical manifesto? In the Balfour Declaration which wasn’t worth the paper it was written on? In the false promises of Leon Blum, Macdonald, Pearl, Diamond, Gompers?

  I reminded him about the number of comrades who had gone to the land of socialism only to disappear, but Meir Milner shouted: “False accusations from fascist dogs! Lies fabricated by the reactionary pigs! Delusions of Trotskyite provocateurs!”

  “Let them burn like a wet rag, slowly,” interposed Mottel the wag, “there is one cure for them—to be made a head shorter.”

  “One death isn’t enough for them!” Meir Milner snarled along.

  For the countless time I grew astounded over the bloodthirstiness that had been aroused among Jewish youth after two thousand years of Diaspora, after centuries of ghettos. If Lamarck and his disciples were correct in that acquired traits are inherited, every Jew should have emerged a hundred per cent pacifist. Modern Jews and Muslims should be born circumcised. I read books about biology and was particularly interested in the debate between the mechanists and the vitalists, the Lamarckists and the Darwinists.

  Late at night I went to sleep. It was a tiny room with a window facing a blank wall. It was half-dark in there even on the brightest day. There was no electricity in the house, only gaslight. I had taken on so much work that I was constantly behind.

  I lay awake thinking about Gina. I had visited her during the Days of Awe—a sick woman alone in the woods and far from neighbors, from a store, and without a telephone. She sat there and waited for death. This was no longer the Gina I knew but someone else; completely unfamiliar to me. She had almost stopped talking. I tried to carry on a conversation with her about the supernatural but she didn’t answer. Had she given up her belief in the immortality of the soul? Had she lied earlier about her communications with the dead and now no longer sought to deceive me? Or had she gained access to secrets denied the healthy? I had the feeling that whatever I said to her would constitute a burden.

  I asked her if she wanted to accompany me to the synagogue to hear the blowing of the ram’s horn, and she replied:

  “What for?”

  And soon there was nothing left to say.

  I wanted to come to her bed at night. I hoped to rouse a passion within her and to make her talkative one last time, but Gina said that she must sleep alone. Weak as she was, she had made up a bed for me on a cot in the same room where she slept. She put out the lamp and grew immediately silent. I didn’t hear her breathing. During the day she occasionally erupted in a wet cough but that night I didn’t hear so much as a rustle from her. She had apparently swallowed a number of sleeping pills and had sunk into a kind of coma. I was afraid lest she die in the night.

  Strangely enough, she had formed a friendship with a woman named Genia who was also consumptive and with whom she was more open and talkative. Genia’s brother was a doctor in Warsaw. She came each morning to visit and brought food she had bought for Gina. Genia liked to talk. In the two days that I spent with Gina, Genia and I became so friendly that we kissed when I left. She told me that doctors—her brother concurring—had given her a year to live. She lived next door to a friend, a young man who was in the last stages of consumption and could last another six months at best. She confided to me that Gina was hardly as sick physically as she assumed. Doctors who had examined her had agreed that she suffered from anemia, but it wasn’t the kind of anemia that necessarily killed. She had been prescribed injections and a diet of liver which she ignored. Gina no longer wanted to live. I knew that it was my fault. My leaving to take a room at Dr. Alpert’s had convinced her that all the hopes she had placed in me had been foolish.

  My having moved in with Sabina seemed to me even more than foolish. I had light-mindedly broken up a match between two young people. I generally wasn’t inclined to marriage and even if I had been, it certainly wouldn’t be to someone like Sabina. Although I didn’t follow in the path of my pious parents, I had retained an ideal of a wife as my parents conceived it—a decent Jewish daughter, a virgin who after the wedding would serve if not one God at least one man. In brief, a wife like my mother. I should have admitted this to Sabina, but I saw that she was tired of flighty affairs and that she longed with all her womanly instincts for a husband, a home, and children. She might have calculated that in time I might tear myself away from Poland. Since my brother was a correspondent for an American newspaper, I had some connection with America. Somewhere inside, the Polish Jews sensed that they were doomed. I knew full well that playing around with women meant toying with lives, but I lacked the character and the strength to heed the voice of my conscience. I belonged to a generation which no longer believed in free will and which based everything on circumstances, ideologies, and complexes.

  That night I had slept an hour or two. Suddenly, I awoke. Sabina was bending over me and her hair brushed my face. She too couldn’t live like her righteous forebears. Although she was a leftist and I was considered a rightist, we were united by the same passion—to seize every possible pleasure at any price before we vanish forever.

  One day as I sat in my room at Dr. Alpert’s trying to stretch the novel in the Radio so that I could collect my sixty zlotys another few months, Marila the maid knocked to announce with a smile
and a wink that I was wanted on the phone by a “beautiful young lady.”

  I went to the phone and heard a voice that seemed familiar, yet I couldn’t place it. I searched my mind, and the woman at the other end of the wire made fun of my poor memory and tried to offer me hints to help jog it. After a while she revealed her identity: the former Stefa Janovsky and current Madam Treitler.

  We were both silent for a long while, then I asked:

  “What did you have, a boy or a girl?”

  “I had nothing. Forget it.”

  “Your parents—”

  “Mother died.”

  “Mark—”

  “He is dead too. Not really, but as far as I’m concerned. I beg you not to mention his name. I’ve forgotten him completely. But as you see, you I haven’t forgotten. Isn’t that strange?”

  “If it’s true.”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  LOST IN AMERICA

  * * *

  One

  1

  At the onset of the 1930s, my disillusionment with myself reached a stage in which I had lost all hope. If truth be told, I had had little of it to lose. Hitler was on the verge of assuming power in Germany. The Polish fascists proclaimed that as far as the Jews were concerned they had the same plans for them as did the Nazis. Gina had died and only then did I realize what a treasure of love, devotion, faith in God and in human values I had lost. Stefa had married the rich Mr. Leon Treitler. My brother Joshua, his wife, Genia, and their younger son, Yosele, had gone to America, where he would work for The Jewish Daily Forward. Their elder son, Yasha, a lad of fourteen, had died of pneumonia. The boy’s death drove me into a depression that remains with me to this day. It was my first direct contact with death.

  My father also died around this time. Even though over forty years have passed, I still cannot go into details about this loss. All I can say is that he lived like a saint and he died like one, blessed with a faith in God, His mercy, His Providence. My lack of this faith is actually the story which I am about to tell.