There was a time when I used to catch flies, tear off their wings, and put them into boxes of matches with a drop of water and a grain of sugar for nourishment. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I was committing terrible crimes against those creatures just because I was bigger than they, stronger, and defter. While I was always angry with the wicked, I was wicked myself toward those who were weaker than I.76
Juxtaposing these passages, we realize that if—by virtue of his inability to watch the death of the flies with indifference and even enjoyment—there is something defective in Fischelson’s efforts to emulate Spinoza, for Singer this is to his credit, even if this moral advantage goes unrecognized by Fischelson himself.
The rest of the story narrates Fischelson’s continued fall from the Spinozan ideal. Like Spinoza, he is beset with maladies, in his case not a life-threatening tuberculosis but a stomach ailment that causes pain “after only a few mouthfuls of oatmeal.” Yet instead of bearing his lot stoically, he bemoans it, even instinctively crying out “God in Heaven, it’s difficult, difficult” to a supernatural deity he presumably denies. When, from his attic window, he looks down from the heavens to behold the bedlam of Jewish Warsaw, with all its sounds and smells, its mixture of the sacred and the profane, the calm of his amor dei intellectualis is rudely interrupted. “He knew that the behavior of this rabble was the very antithesis of reason. These people were immersed in the vainest of passions, were drunk with emotions, and according to Spinoza, emotion was never good.”77 Fischelson experiences a quasi-religious feeling at the thought that he is made of the same substance as the “celestial bodies,” but he literally cannot stomach that he is made of the same matter as Warsaw’s “rabble.”78 Nor, as the author makes clear, is he free of its irrationalism:
Even the cats which loitered on the roofs here seemed more savage and passionate than those in other parts of the town. They caterwauled with the voices of women in labor, and like demons scampered up walls and leaped into eaves and balconies. One of the toms paused at Dr. Fischelson’s window and let out a howl which made Dr. Fischelson shudder. The doctor stepped from the window and, picking up a broom, brandished it in front of the black beast’s glowing, green eyes. “Scat, begone, you ignorant savage!”—and he rapped the broom handle against the roof until the tom ran off.79
Who is it that perceives the cats as “demons,” and the one at the window as a “black beast” with “glowing, green eyes”? Though related in the third person, the point of view appears to be that of Fischelson himself—again, the Fischelson who presumably is not superstitious and does not believe in devils. Regardless, the same Fischelson who starts by castigating the crowd for their immersion “in the vainest of passions” is overcome, as he chases away the tomcat, by a moment of passion.
With the failure of his pension to arrive on time, followed by the sudden outbreak of the First World War, Fischelson reaches a point of near total unraveling. The chaos on the streets, the unavailability of food or anyone who can help him, sends him into a nervous spell. He drags himself home and lies down in bed, convinced he is dying, and falls into a deep sleep with vivid, mysterious dreams. On awaking, “[h]e tried to meditate about his extraordinary dream, to find its rational connection with what was happening to him and to comprehend sub specie eternitatis, but none of it made sense.”
Then comes the moment of renversement. “The eternal laws, apparently, had not yet ordained Dr. Fischelson’s end.” Enter Black Dobbe, a homely spinster who lives next door. She is “tall and lean, and as black as a baker’s shovel.” Her nose is broken, she has “a mustache on her upper lip,” she speaks “with the hoarse voice of a man,” and wears “men’s shoes.” Put simply, she is physically repulsive and even ridiculous. She is a poor and simple Warsaw Jew, uneducated, illiterate, superstitious by nature. She used to sell bread and bagels she bought from a baker but now has been reduced to selling “wrinklers”—that is, “cracked eggs”—in the marketplace.80 About all that she has in common with Fischelson is that she too is unmarried and alone. This was not her choice, though: Engaged several times, on each occasion the groom-to-be jilted her.
The plot device that brings the two together is a letter. Black Dobbe needs a letter from her American cousin to be read for her and, finding no one else around, reluctantly knocks on the door of the heretic. But the door has been left slightly ajar, and opens to reveal Fischelson lying in bed unconscious. Black Dobbe revives him with water, helps him up, smooths down his blanket, and prepares a meal for him. Fischelson, in turn, reads the letter to her and disabuses her of the notion that he is a convert and that the Ethics must be a “gentile prayer book” by insisting to be “a Jew like any other Jew.”
Despite his temporary recovery, Fischelson remains certain he is on death’s door and prepares a will. “But death did not come. Rather his health improved.” Meanwhile, he begins to spend more time with Black Dobbe. She cooks for him and tells him the word on the street about the war; he shows her his telescope and regales her with stories of his years in Switzerland and other European cities. The final hook comes when Black Dobbe brings out her trousseau from one of her earlier engagements. “And she began to spread out, on the chair, dresses—woolen, silk, velvet. Taking each dress up in turn, she held it to her body. She gave him an account of every item in her trousseau—underwear, shoes, stockings.” She turns silent, her face “brick-red,” while “Dr. Fischelson’s body suddenly began to shake as if he had the chills.” “Very nice, beautiful things,” are the only words he can manage to utter.
Fischelson’s betrayal of Spinoza continues with the wedding to Black Dobbe that immediately follows—a betrayal only heightened by the fact that it is conducted “according to the law,” with a rabbi officiating, the groom wearing the traditional white robe (or kitel), and Black Dobbe circling him seven times “as custom required.” Dobbe is like a woman transformed—beaming and all decked out in “a wide-brimmed hat” adorned with fruit, a dress of “white silk,” high-heeled shoes, and ample jewelry—but Fischelson remains weak, frail, even gloomy. He is “scarcely able to walk” and too weak to break the goblet at the end of the ceremony with his foot. All in all, he is “anxious to return as quickly as possible to his attic room,” and to get back to the Ethics.
But the final surprise in a string of them—a surprise that never could have been derived at according to the geometric method—occurs that night in the marital bed. Interrupting Fischelson in his reading of the Ethics, Dobbe appears “wearing a silk nightgown, slippers with pompoms, and with her hair hanging over her shoulders.” Fischelson, in turn, drops the Ethics from his hands. Intense, passionate lovemaking follows. “What happened that night,” the narrator suggests, “could be called a miracle. If Dr. Fischelson hadn’t been convinced that every occurrence is in accordance with the laws of nature he would have thought that Black Dobbe bewitched him. Powers long dormant awakened in him. . . . Although he had only a sip of the benediction wine, he was as if intoxicated.” The word intoxicated (vi a shikur) is perhaps a sly allusion to Spinoza, the “God-intoxicated man,” only here the intoxication comes from great, revitalizing sex. Fischelson is “again a man as in his youth,” his pains alleviated, his health and virility restored.
Is this consummation of the marriage—a consummation in stark contrast to the unfinished commentary on the Ethics—in fact a miracle, no matter what Fischelson thinks? Is Fischelson’s sudden Viagra-like potency a product of supernatural intervention? Here we might benefit from stepping back to consider “The Destruction of Kreshev” (1943), one of Singer’s “devil” stories written only a year before “The Spinoza of Market Street.” The story begins:
I AM the Primeval Snake, the Evil One, Satan. The cabala refers to me as Samael and the Jews sometimes call me merely, “that one.”
It is well-known that I love to arrange strange marriages, delighting in such mismatings as an old man with a young girl, an unattractive widow with a youth in his prime, a cripple with great beauty, a m
ute with a braggart.81
The mismatch here is between Lise, the devoted daughter of Reb Bunim, the richest man in the Polish shtetl of Kreshev and a generous, upstanding pillar of the community, and a brilliant, “extremely clever” yeshiva student, Shloimele, who is a secret follower of Shabbtai Zvi, the false messiah. Shloimele lures her, with elaborate theological justifications, into acts of ever greater sexual deviance, culminating in his persuading her to have sex with an ox of a man, her father’s ignorant coachman Mendel. Shloimele’s subsequent admission of the havoc he has wrought brings apocalpyse down on Kreshev: Lise is formally divorced from Shloimele and publicly humiliated, driving her to suicide; Mendel is flogged and imprisoned and, once freed, torches the town in revenge.
No supernatural voice narrates “The Spinoza of Market Street.” And yet, here too we have what can only be described as a “strange marriage”—the coupling of an intellectual with an illiterate, an expert in Spinoza’s Ethics with a seller of cracked eggs. Here too, moreover, the moment of truth occurs in the bedchamber. In this case, however, the marriage of Nahum Fischelson and Black Dobbe yields a kind of salvation instead of damnation, a comic rather than tragic ending. The implication of the story is that the “eternal laws” that “had not yet ordained Nahum Fischelson’s end” are not Spinoza’s ironclad laws of nature but the whims of uncanny, vitalistic forces, which here lead to life, not death; joy, not destruction.82
This insight, however, is denied Fischelson. No sooner has he risen from bed at dawn than he quickly regrets his opting for carnal knowledge over the amor dei intellectualis:
Dr. Fischelson looked up at the sky. The black arch was thickly sown with stars—there were green, red, yellow, blue stars; there were large ones and small ones, winking and steady ones. There were those that were clustered in dense groups and those that were alone. In the higher sphere, apparently, little notice was taken of the fact that a certain Dr. Fischelson had in his declining days married someone called Black Dobbe. Seen from above, even the Great War was nothing but a temporary play of the modes. The myriads of fixed stars continued to travel their destined courses in unbounded space. The comets, planets, satellites, asteroids kept circling these shining centers. Worlds were born and died in cosmic upheavals. In the chaos of nebulae, primeval matter was being formed . . . and he Dr. Fischelson, with his unavoidable fate, was a part of this. The doctor closed his eyelids and allowed the breeze to cool the sweat of his forehead and stir the hair of his beard. He breathed deeply of the midnight air, supported his shaky hands on the window sill and murmured, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me I have become a fool.”83
The philosopher and Spinoza scholar Steven B. Smith has questioned whether Fischelson’s lament in his famous last words—“Divine Spinoza, forgive me I have become a fool”—reflects an accurate understanding of Spinoza’s philosophy of the passions. “Fischelson believes that erotic love is at odds with the life of reason,” Smith writes, “but Spinoza constantly reminds us that mind and body are not two substances at war with one another, but two aspects of the same individual. The passions are not at odds with reason, but ‘inadequate ideas’ waiting to be developed.”84 Despite his encyclopedic knowledge of the Ethics, Fischelson has forgotten the crucial third proposition of the fifth book, Of Human Freedom: “An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” For Smith, this raises the question whether Singer is satirizing Spinoza, or only Fischelson’s idolatrous yet imperfect understanding of him. Smith leans toward the latter. My own reading is that he is mocking both. One need only consult one of his later interviews, where he admitted that “what I wanted to say [in “The Spinoza of Market Street”] was that if you are a human being, if you are alive, you cannot live according to Spinoza,” to realize that Singer did view passionate love as a betrayal of Spinoza—but a worthy betrayal.85 (Smith may be right about Spinoza, but in that case, both Fischelson and Singer himself are fools.) In this reading, Fischelson is a fool for thinking himself a fool simply for having married and slept with a woman—and having been as if reborn in the process. He is a fool for failing to appreciate the miracle of an aging, decrepit scholar discovering the fountain of youth.
Fischelson may think he has betrayed Spinoza by succumbing to passion. But the problematic passion, Singer suggests, lies in his obsessive attachment to the Ethics and the elusive amor dei intellectualis, an attachment that even true love cannot break.
VI.
I convinced myself that philosophy can never reveal anything. It can tell us what we cannot do, but it can never tell us what we can do.86
Sixteen months after the publication of “Der Shpinozist” in Di tsukunft, Singer transposed the Spinoza theme from the short story form to the serialized novel. In November, 1945—six months after the end of the war against Germany and the revelation of the full catastrophe of European Jewry—Der Forverts printed the first installment of Di familye Mushkat [The Family Moskat]. It ran for nearly three years.87 In 1950 it became the first of Singer’s novels to be translated into English, albeit in substantially abridged form. Set largely in Warsaw and its environs and stretching from prewar czarist Poland to Hitler’s invasion in September 1939, the novel traces the demise of East European Jewry through the prism of four generations of a particular family, ruled at the beginning by its wealthy patriarch, Reb Meshulam Moskat. In Singer’s artistic vision, the ruination of the Moskat family transpires on two planes. On one hand, it is a product of the entropic and corrosive forces of modernity. The sacred canopy of the Law, with its multiple fences and restrictions, steadily recedes. The authority of rabbis and patriarchs alike withers. Romantic love preempts arranged marriages and wrecks existing ones; new, secular political ideologies, from Zionism to socialism, become surrogates for traditional faith; and migration to America threatens to sever connection to Yiddishkayt altogether. Yet all this fragmentation is ultimately trumped by the tragic fate they share—the looming destruction of the Moskats, and of East European Jewry as a whole, at the hands of the Nazis.
In The Family Moskat, Spinoza functions as the signature of a single character, albeit one of the most central in a book swarming with them—the figure of Asa (Oyzer) Heshel Bannet. We meet him for the first time at the start of the second chapter:
A few weeks after Meshulam Moskat returned to Warsaw another traveler arrived at the station in the northern part of the capital. He climbed down from a third-class car carrying an oblong metal-bound basket locked with a double lock. He was a young man, about nineteen. His name was Asa Heshel Bannet. On his mother’s side he was the grandson of Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen, the rabbi of Tereshpol Minor. He had with him a letter of recommendation to the learned Dr. Shmaryahu Jacobi, secretary of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw. In his pocket rested a worn volume, the Ethics of Spinoza in Hebrew translation (ibergezetzt in loshn-koydesh).88
Our earlier discussion of Singer’s autobiographical writings suggests that the resemblance between author and character is more than accidental. Yet the genealogy of this figure clearly is meant to extend further back. Though he arrives in Warsaw still wearing sidelocks and a gaberdine coat, Asa Heshel is the proverbial talmudic prodigy turned maskil, a type familiar since Salomon Maimon. In describing the intellectual journey of the young heretic the narrator furnishes us with the arc of Spinoza’s Jewish rehabilitation, in miniature:
He attended cheder for only half a day. He quickly got the reputation of a prodigy. At five he was studying Talmud, at six he began the Talmudic commentators, at eight the teacher had no more to give him. At the age of nine he delivered a discourse in the synagogue, and at twelve he was writing learned letters to rabbis in other towns. . . . Matchmakers flooded the family with matrimonial offers; the townsfolk predicted that he was sure, in God’s good time, to inherit his grandfather’s rabbinical chair. . . . And then what does the promising youth do but abandon the roads of righteousness and join the ranks of the “moderns”? He would start endless disputes wi
th the others . . . in the study house and criticize the rabbis. He prayed without putting on the customary prayer sash, scribbled on the margins of the sacred books, made mock of the pious. Instead of studying the Commentaries he delved into Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed and Jehuda Halevi’s Khuzari. Somwhere he got hold of the writings of the heretic Salomon Maimon.89
In short, Asa Heshel has traveled the road from the beys medresh to Maimonides to Spinoza, with the assistance of Rubin’s Hebrew translation of the Ethics. He arrives in Warsaw with barely a possession to his name, but he has his “new” guide to the perplexed, he has his Spinoza.
According to his letter of recommendation, written by the head of the modern Jewish school in Zamosc, Asa Heshel has come to Warsaw “because of his thirst for enlightenment,” more specifically with the aim of acquiring a formal high school and university education and an “honorable livelihood.” Yet this sense of purpose is belied by the previous depiction of Asa Heshel before leaving home. On one hand, he is consumed by “eternal questions” about the existence of God, the responsibility of man, and the immortality of the soul. On the other, he is congenitally passive, undisciplined, and resigned, more strung along by events than working to shape them.90 He begins courses of study without completing them. He reads without method. “Each day he would make up his mind anew to leave the town, and each day he stayed.” In the end, the truth of the matter is that he leaves the shtetl of Tereshpol Minor for Warsaw not “because of his thirst for enlightenment”—as a boy from the provinces determined to “make it” in the big city—but because he is compelled to by circumstances. The man who proposes marriage to Asa Heshel’s mother hinges his offer on her heretical son’s leaving town. And so doubts are sown, from the very outset, as to whether Asa will be able to resist the temptations of Warsaw and commit to the pursuit of secular learning that is his putative aim.
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