Sometimes the things we love wend their way into our lives in the most unassuming of ways. A number of years ago, trawling the library catalogue for something new to read, I tried to remember a conversation I had with my aunt about an author who, from the little I could remember, had three names and wrote in Yiddish.
When Isaac Bashevis Singer finally cropped up in my search results, I read his novel The Slave, a tragic allegorical tale of love and pilgrimage set in Poland following the Chmielnicki Uprising, but didn’t much like it, having found the allegory too heavy-handed and the prose too stilted.
I didn’t bother picking up another of Singer’s novels for quite some time, but eventually found myself being tugged in the direction of his writing once more, and now, when scanning the shelves of used bookshops, his name is always one of the first that I seek out.
Born in Poland in 1902, Singer immigrated to America in 1935 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. His literary works bring to life 1000 years of Polish Jewish history.
What makes Singer’s writing so meaningful? Part of the answer, for myself at least, is cultural; as someone with ethnic Polish heritage on my mother’s side, his tales evoke both familiarity and distance.
In fact, like all good literature, Singer’s stories are replete with various tensions – between tradition and modernity, Jews and Gentiles, the Old World and the New, the sacred and the profane, the literal and the symbolic, the individual and the collective. He writes history through intimate, slice-of-life portraits of humanity in all its glorious complexity. Singer’s characters are mystics and whores, delicate intellectuals and carnal rogues, pious patriarchs and renegade daughters. They are, ultimately, utterly human.
I most recently read The Family Moskat, a family saga that takes place in Warsaw from the early 20th century to the eve of the Second World War. It is a novel I would recommend to anyone and one that I will certainly return to again. The novel’s gamut of characters reflects the diversity of the human experience; they are all deeply flawed but striving, in their different ways, to understand and navigate this strange thing called life.
Singer depicts his characters wonderfully. Take, for instance, these descriptions of two of the Moskat children:
Joel, Meshulam’s oldest son, a man in his late fifties, unusually tall, with a big belly and a mottled red neck, had the reputation of being a gambler. Everything about Joel was enormous: the bulging blue eyes, the fleshy, pitted nose, the large ears with the thick lobes.
Nathan was shorter than Joel, but stouter, with the high round belly of a pregnant woman, a short fleshy neck, and a double chin. Only a few sparse hairs sprouted on his face; the family had always felt that he was a bit lacking in masculinity.
And the women! Strong, stubborn, brilliant, flawed.
A taste:
The women’s table was a buzz of talk, most of the conversation monopolized by Joel’s wife, Esther – Queen Esther, as the family called her – an Amazonian woman with a triple chin and a vast bosom.
Hama stood before [her husband] in a black, shabby dress, her face jaundiced, three hairs descending from the mole on her chin. She looked at him with more scorn than anger. ‘God help me,’ she said, ‘What you look like! Something the cat dragged in.’
Underpinning all his works is a foundation of Judaism and Jewish philosophy, which acts as a salve for some characters and a force to grapple with for others. I’ll leave you now with a passage from another novel, Meshugah, which captures the aforementioned tensions that are integral to his work, and, in a world in which we are thrown from one tragedy to another, feels particularly apt:
I often remembered the words of the Cabalists, that man was sent to this world for the sake of Tikkun. We were continuously asked to mend our errors. Even in the sphere of Atzilut, the world of emanation, the vessels were shattered and divine sparks were scattered down on the abyss below into the world of the Kelipah. Art had a good deal to learn from those ancient mystics and from their symbols.
May we all capture a shard of that divine spark and may our art always be inspired by those who came before us.
Thanks for reading. See you in two weeks.
A note to my readers:
Yesterday was my birthday! In honour of this milestone, I’d like to ask for your help in raising funds for the humanitarian response in Ukraine.
This conflict hits close to home – my grandparents suffered under Russian occupation in Poland, and Eastern Europe is a region I care deeply about. Consider making a donation to the Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal, a joint charitable venture of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) and the Canada-Ukraine Foundation (CUF), or a branch of Red Cross in your country. Thank you!
What’s a good Singer novel to start with, Emily? Also, happy birthday!!