by I. J. Singer
Intent upon portraying the historical changes that had created heavy Jewish concentrations in cities like Warsaw and Lodz, I. J. Singer built his work upon spacious architectural principles. He sought to compose novels with a multitude of characters, interwoven strands of plot, and social groups depicted as active and coherent social forces: novels such as we associate with the early Thomas Mann, Arnold Bennett, Jules Romains, and Roger Martin du Gard. Tremendously popular during the early years of the century, this sort of family chronicle took as its assumption the relative stability and “thereness” of bourgeois society, though with some of its keener practitioners, such as Mann and Martin du Gard, there was also a gathering awareness of conflict, disintegration, unnerving change. By focusing on a family as its basic unit, by placing in this family representatives of both the official outlook of society and the emerging tendencies to call into question the values of that society, such writers were able to concentrate—which is to say, dramatize—in one sweeping narrative what they took to be the central problems of the day. Stability and crisis could be pitted against one another within the perimeter of a family, often through the device of a struggle between brothers.
I. J. Singer mastered, as few Yiddish writers have, the problems of construction peculiar to this kind of novel: how to link and contrast parallel plots, how to balance clusters of characters against one another, how to bring together a large span of novelistic time with at least some moments of intensely realized detail. It’s hard to say, and probably not very important, whether he modeled himself consciously on the European masters of the family chronicle or, because he was subject to parallel pressures and needs, developed on his own parallel strategies of composition. But what strikes one as especially interesting here is that Singer submitted himself, rather like the European novelists of the early twentieth century, to the idea of history, the persuasion that overwhelms Dickens and Zola, Flaubert and Tolstoy that men are caught up by vast, often incomprehensible historical forces which shape and break them. I. J. Singer learned to think, that is, in terms of historical momentum and sweep; learned to see his characters as representative of public energies, agents of public causes. Quite as if he had gone to school with the European masters, or had learned their lessons outside of school, he came to see modern society as a complex organism with “a life of its own,” a destiny superseding and sometimes canceling out the will of its individual members. He even came to recognize the extent to which historical events can be deeply irrational, a mere onrush of destructive impulses neither understood nor controlled.
For a Yiddish writer of sixty or seventy years ago, all this was decidedly new. It meant a struggle to master both an ambitious mode of narrative and an underlying complexity of social relations that could not easily be acquired within the limits of traditional Yiddish culture. Yet I. J. Singer’s intense self-awareness that he was a Yiddish writer, or a Jew who wrote novels, also meant that he had to make some modifications in the scheme of the family chronicle. The Jewish past enters The Brothers Ashkenazi in a series of evocations that seem to be in contrast with the idea of historical dynamism, for that past bears an aura of fixity, of unrelenting stasis. More striking, The Brothers Ashkenazi ends rather bitterly with a tacit repudiation of the very idea of history that has served as its organizing principle; finally, suggests I. J. Singer, the Jews cannot expect much (or anything) good from the uproar of industrialism, revolution, and other modes of gentile action—finally, they are left with the perennial problem, or possibility, of being Jews. It’s as if I. J. Singer had hitched a ride on a European vehicle and at the end decided he had to jump off, or acknowledged that he had been pushed off.
When the fiction of I. J. Singer first became popular in America some forty years ago, the social novel seemed very attractive to readers, including those who thought of the novel as a serious art form and not just a passing entertainment. Today I. J. Singer’s work may appear a little old-fashioned—mistakenly so, I would argue—to young people brought up on the postmodernist writers.
It is precisely such young people who form a significant portion of the public that has responded enthusiastically to the younger Singer. This is a public composed of third-generation and semiassimilated Jews, as well as gentile literary fellow travelers, whose nostalgia or curiosity about Jewishness has its visible limits but who find in the author of Satan in Goray and Shosha a congenial voice. They are not entirely mistaken. Isaac Bashevis Singer brings together touches of esoteric Judaica, mostly from the cabalistic and Sabbatian traditions, and a playful sophisticated tone: the first requires no serious commitment from the reader, only a frisson of response, and the second allows for immediate familiarity. It is a rather odd mixture, but it speaks to cultivated American readers as the work of no other Yiddish writer can—at least for the moment. These are readers who take for granted the necessity, perhaps even desirability, of the disintegration of the traditional nineteenth-century novel and assume it to be a literary sign of some larger social disintegration. They have become, or been taught to be, impatient with books like Buddenbrooks or The Old Wives’ Tale or The Thibaults. A certain misunderstanding, I would argue, is at work here between American readers and Isaac Bashevis Singer, a misunderstanding which for obvious reasons neither takes pains to remove. For while the admirers of the younger Singer are right in feeling that he is closer to them than any other Yiddish writer they are likely to encounter—closer in quizzical tone, in fondness for extreme states of being, in spiritual restlessness—still, the truth is that he is not quite the delightfully perverse modern voice some of his admirers take him to be. Despite his canniness and charm, the younger Singer goes his own way, and it is not along paths his admirers are likely to go.
We have here another example of the notorious instability of literary taste. It would be convenient to foreclose the matter by saying that I. J. Singer, the elder brother, is a premodernist writer and that I. B. Singer, the younger brother, is a modernist, or that the first drew his acclaim from middlebrow and the second from highbrow audiences; but that would be rather glib, even if with a shred of truth. For both Singers are serious writers, and the varying responses to their work have less to do with their intrinsic merits or qualities than with their imaginative relation to the Jewish tradition. I. J. Singer writes within the orbit of, even as he begins a withdrawal from, the moral values of Yiddish secular culture: humanist, rationalist, socially concerned. I. B. Singer has taken a step his older brother could not take. Though a master of Yiddish prose, he has cut himself off from the norms and styles of Yiddish culture, simultaneously moving backward to a pre-Enlightenment sensibility and forward to modernism.
What the generation of Yiddish writers contemporaneous with I. J. Singer sought most of all was to break away from the introspective themes and winding rhythms of shtetl writers like Mendele and Sholom Aleichem, to bring into Yiddish literature the worldly concerns and narrative sweep of the European novel, to project Jewish figures no longer merely passive and pious but now aggressively on the historical stage: capitalists, revolutionists, political leaders. A now-aging or perhaps already-gone generation of Yiddish readers was inclined to praise a writer like I. J. Singer as universal. To such readers, starting to find their way into Western life and culture, there could be no higher praise; to us, some decades later, things are decidedly less clear.
Somehow, whether directly or not, I. J. Singer absorbed the lesson of Turgenev and Flaubert that the novelist must keep himself strictly out of the events he renders, as if in literature he were an invisible hand somewhat like the one projected by Adam Smith in economics.* This assumption was no more congenial to the earlier Yiddish writers, the generation of Mendele and Sholom Aleichem, than laissez-faire was to the shtetl economy in which they grew up, for in a sense not true in more sophisticated cultures, the Yiddish writers had to be present in their fictions as stage managers, raissoneurs, ethical monitors, stand-ins for characters, and prompters for readers. The idea of “esthetic distance�
� was, for most of the late-nineteenth-century Yiddish writers, neither possible nor desirable. It is an idea that simply made no sense to a culture constantly in peril of destruction.
In the fiction of I. J. Singer, nevertheless, one is strongly aware of the kind of detachment—a tactical employment of a subject or milieu rather than a cultural submission to it—which is entirely familiar to recent Western literature. This, in part, is obviously a sign of the gradual secularization of the East European Jewish world. Yiddish writers of I. J. Singer’s generation tried consciously to find literary models outside their own tradition; they were weary of shtetl woes and shtetl charms; they wanted a richer, more worldly literature than their immediate predecessors could manage or saw any need for. But there is more to it with the older Singer. One suspects that the coolness, the somewhat clenched distance that are his characteristic stance had a deeply personal source, the consequence of a temperament somewhat rare in Yiddish literature. A good many of the characters, especially the central one, Max, in The Brothers Ashkenazi, are inflamed, driven, compulsive; they go through their lives with a red-eyed submission to imperatives beyond their grasp or even naming, but Singer himself writes with a deeply skeptical tone. Or so, at least, I read him. The passion of his characters is evoked, with frequent success, the passion of the historical traumas through which they move is often brilliantly captured; but Singer himself keeps at a distance. He was a deeply skeptical writer, not merely with regard to the political and national ideologies raging through the Jewish communities of Poland and Russia during the last few decades of the nineteenth century but also with regard to the whole human enterprise: the possibility of happiness, the relevance of salvation.
Now in part this flows from the conventions of the social novel as composed in Europe during the early twentieth century—conventions of motivating attitude and narrative point of view that indicate a deep uncertainty about the survival of European civilization. In part the skepticism of the older Singer may have emerged from the Haskalah (Enlightenment) line of Jewish opinion that was rationalistic, dubious about invoked sublimities, and hostile to the sort of religio-political ecstatics that the younger Singer has written about. But beyond such possibilities, one feels in I. J. Singer’s work an ineradicable personal bias, that root of temperament which yields the gray flowers of skepticism and perhaps even nihilism.* Though sharing little of his younger brother’s taste for the bizarre and perverse, he is finally a writer more austere and disenchanted, certainly less given to blurring the world with charm. Whoever listens to the tone of The Brothers Ashkenazi will, I think, hear the austerity and “toughness” of which I speak. It is a tone also to be heard in Yoshe Kalb, I. J. Singer’s short, brilliant novel about the Hasidic milieu. And it can be heard most subtly of all in Singer’s story “Repentance” (see A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, edited by Howe and Greenberg, or The River Breaks Up, by I. J. Singer), where the Hasidic obsession with joy is shown gradually turning into a kind of moral ruthlessness.
The narrative pattern of The Brothers Ashkenazi, as it seeks to encompass the historical novelties of East European Jewish life in the late nineteenth century, necessarily imposes limits on the author. Of inner psychic being, of the nuances of feeling and reflection that we have come to expect in the depiction of character, The Brothers Ashkenazi has rather little. When Singer turns to the more intimate spheres of human experience, the writing can seem embarrassed; the romantic scenes tend toward the slapdash, as if something to be gotten over with. We see Max Ashkenazi mainly from the outside and his brother, Jacob, from varying distances; mostly this is as it should be, for the inner lives of such men can be of only limited interest. What matters about them is what they do, not what they think.
Singer is dealing here with one of the great themes of the nineteenth-century European novel, a theme especially exciting to Yiddish readers of, say, forty or fifty years ago—the rise of capitalism in its “heroic” or adventuresome phase and the accompanying entry of the Jews onto the stage of historical action, whether through the accumulation of capital which obsesses Max Ashkenazi or through the gathering of rebellion which forms the goal of his socialist antagonists. If the objectives of these two contending forces are at polar opposites, Singer brilliantly shows how their outpourings of energy, their hungers to leave a mark move along parallel lines. From a traditional Jewish point of view, both styles of conduct must seem equally disturbing and ominous.
It is a virtue of this new translation of The Brothers Ashkenazi, undertaken by the author’s son, that it succeeds in capturing something of the rush, the energy of the original Yiddish. This is not the kind of novel that calls attention to its language, elegant phrase by phrase or fine sentence by sentence; its strength lies in larger verbal units, whole paragraphs and indeed passages, where the power of denotation and accumulation can be registered. The translator has been especially sensitive to these larger rhythms of I. J. Singer’s narrative, rhythms of sweep and surprise, turn and return, precisely the kind one has come to expect in fictions that deal primarily with man as social actor or victim.
Perhaps the most vivid pages in The Brothers Ashkenazi are those in which Singer evokes, in a tone of notable detachment, the mania for accumulation and the consequent loosening of moral constraints that mark the rise of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Lodz.
Lodz seethed in ferment as the city grew day by day, hour by hour. Strangers converged from all over: German engineers and master weavers; English chemists, designers, and patternmakers; Russian merchant princes in blue coats and wide trousers over short patent-leather boots; Jewish traveling salesmen and commission agents—gay, lusty young men who descended upon Lodz to make money and to have fun.
The youth of Lodz began to shave their beards and don worldly attire. Restaurants, cabarets, and gambling casinos opened and drew huge crowds. Hungarian dancers came to further their careers and fatten their purses. Circuses and carnivals arrived from Warsaw and Petersburg, from Berlin and Budapest. Russian functionaries and officers accepted bribes and kickbacks, which they squandered on wine, women, and cards. Lodz drank, sang, danced, attended theaters, caroused in brothels, gambled. Wealthy Hasidim were caught up in the mood of revelry. They lingered in kosher restaurants, where waiters in silk skullcaps brought fat goose thighs and plump waitresses served dried chick-peas and foamy beer. Wastrel Hasidic youths, living on the largess of their fathers-in-law, ceased studying the Torah and played cards in studyhouses.
It is here, in the breaking away from the traditional passivity of East European Jewish life and the new excitements of public will, that I. J. Singer finds his commanding subject. In reading The Brothers Ashkenazi, one is therefore likely to respond most of all to the larger rhythms of narrative and fate, the ferocity with which Jews like Max Ashkenazi—entirely a creature of will, set in contrast with the easy grace of his twin, Jacob—enter the dynamism of modern society. Max is fascinated by the accumulation of capital not so much because it brings him luxuries—which, in any case, he hardly knows how to enjoy—but because it means a chance to bear down upon the world, to show what a frail, unfavored little Jew can accomplish in shaping the life about him. One sometimes fancies, in reading this novel, that Max’s frantic hunger to accumulate symbolizes a release of the blocked energies of whole generations.
In the end it becomes clear that Max cannot really do very much, even as he spins and turns, rushes and calculates. His empire collapses, his brother is murdered by a loutish anti-Semitic officer, and he himself, the great magnate, dies in helpless loneliness, just like everyone else. Jews may enter history, Jews may delude themselves with the excitements of wealth and the enticements of power, but finally, they are puny and helpless before the large brutal forces of the external world, puny and helpless before Polish hatreds and Russian revolutions and Western competition. Max Ashkenazi scribbles on any piece of paper within reach, always calculating risks. His obsessions are not so different from the obsessions of revolutionists who also scribble on
pieces of paper, their calculations ideological rather than financial—especially if one regards them with a certain Jewish detachment. In the end, suggests Singer, it all comes to nothing: perhaps for everyone, certainly for Jews.
Singer is also very keen at depicting the Jewish milieu torn apart by the clashing impulses of old piety and new skepticism, traditional ways and burgeoning appetites. The half-religious or half-skeptical Jew, uncomfortable in his modernity, is one of his recurrent types, yet he quite escapes the sentimental nostalgia for pietistic traditionalism which has become fashionable in recent decades. (He is especially severe on the Hasidim, who often emerge in his pages as uncouth, even savage.) There is a striking passage early in the novel where Singer depicts a group of Jewish boys released from the disciplines of school who
for hours … wandered through the streets of Lodz. They raced down side streets and alleys, exulting in their freedom. They visited marketplaces where peasants milled among their wagons, horses, cattle, swine, poultry, sacks of grain. Jewish housewives in bonnets over shaved skulls wandered among the wagons. They tested the chickens by blowing into their behinds, even poked their fingers inside their cloacas to see if they were carrying eggs. Jews slapped gentile palms to seal bargains; haggled, chewed kernels of grain.