The Avenger
Michal Levin
Collected Stories Isaac Bashevis Singer (Cape £10.50) am the Primeval Snake, the Evil One, 11 Satan. The Cabala refers to me as Samalael and the Jews sometimes call me that one" . It is well known that I love to arrange strange marriages, delighting in such mismatings as an old man with a Young woman, an unattractive widow with a Youth in his prime, a cripple with a great beauty, a cantor with a deaf woman, a braggart with a mute.'
Isaac Bashevis Singer is fascinated by the Primeval Snake. He embraces whole- heartedly the Fall, and its inevitability. Disaster stalks habitually through this col- lection of stories, and along with it the writer's delight in its curious fickle path. He does indeed love to relate, to arrange, strange marriages, mismatings and their More often than not fatal outcomes.
In Singer's world there is no escape. Beauty, symmetry and form seem to inhabit largely nature not man. Fate offers no final solutions, only a constant grind, 'Shoulders are from God, and burdens too'. What a vengeful God, the God of the Old Testa- ment.
Last week I listened to a Serb passionate- lY defending the Begin Government's action to Lebanon. 'They are a small country sur- rounded by enemies,' he argued. 'They live always on the front line. You cannot begin to understand, let alone to criticise from the safety of Britain, with a British perspective'. Over and over, as a fellow member of a small nation he em- phasised, 'Begin acts in self defence. Unless You have lived their terrible history, unless You understand the feelings roused by a Permanent state of seige, you may say nothing, you do not understand'. His logic offers grounds for argument. But putting that aside, reading this collection of stories brought the Serb to my mind.
In Singer's tales there is of course a part of the history the Serb spoke of, a part of the people he defends. Though in the author's introduction to this book, Singer
warns against the writer as sociologist, politician or psychologist, he admits to a deep interest in what he calls 'the combina- tions and complications of heredity and en- vironment'.
Singer's roots are in Eastern European Jewry. He comes from a long line of Polish Hasidic rabbis. His characters are Jewish. Often Polish Jews who live in a setting several centuries old, in squalid little villages with names like Frampol or Krasnobrod. Or in Warsaw, on Krot- chmalna Street, where the Jews lived. Or they are Jewish immigrants in New York, perhaps on the Upper West Side, where Singer himself has lived for more than 40 years. Despite the importance of Jewishness in Singer's stories he is often acclaimed for the wide reaching significance of his work. In 1978, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the award was specifically 'for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in Polish-Jewish cultural traditions, brings universal human conditions to life'. `Gimpel the Fool' belongs fairly to that category — of dealing with universal condi- tions. It is one of his well-known tales in- cluded in this collection.
Gimpel, mocked by all the village for his gullibility, wrestles with classic problems of knowledge and belief. Again and again, for the sake of peace, he overlooks what his senses tell him in favour of fact as con- strued by others. Repeatedly he is deceived and abused. But naivety and simplicity are his protection. Though he loses all his worldly possessions and position, in the end he learns there are no lies, no limits to what can and cannot be. In the end death is the only absolute reality, 'God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived'. But although many of the stories deal with universal problems — albeit in a Jewish idiom — there is an underlying, unremitting pattern of doom and disaster. Satanic power at play. I cannot help but suspect that this is an integral part of Singer's Jewish idiom. Overall, man (Jewish man?) in these stories is defenceless, unprotected and, worse still, unable to protect himself before powerful, callous or malevolent forces. As a hero Gimpel is almost an ex- ception. Simplicity protects him from feel- ing life's worst ravages.
The hero of 'A Day in Coney Island' is far more typical. 'As my game with the powers on high stood now, I seemed to have won a dollar and some cents and to have lost refuge in America and a woman I really loved'. And in Singer's world there are no second chances. (And it all followed a very trivial incident.) In 'The Destruction of Kreshev', life plays an equally remorseless game. A rich saviour appears to a poverty-stricken village. The villagers are so brazen as to embrace the possibility of help. Inevitably carnage follows. The saviour is no saviour but a Devil. There is some protection in dedication to family and work (e.g. 'The Little Shoemakers',) but simply being pious and good is no defence in itself, (`Short Friday'). Neither love nor
women seem very positive forces either. After all 'there isn't a woman in the world who is not the granddaughter of Eve'. And `Every encounter between a man and a woman leads to sin, disappointment, humiliation'.
But, there are two forces, and they are extraordinarily strong ones, that work against all this negativism. Singer is a con- sumate storyteller. He writes as if his first, most important aim is to hold your atten- tion, which he does with considerable suc- cess. (He even uses the old device `to cut a long story short'.) Then there is a strength and directness in the language that drives the tales on. Perhaps its the power of the Yiddish — a peasant language — in which they are originally written. Several of the stories also have the distinction of having been translated by accomplished writers too. (Saul Bellow translated `Gimpel the Fool'.) The most telling comment on this collection is Singer's own in the introduc- tion. 'At its best Art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while. I am still working hard to make that "while" worthwhile'. What, if anything, the stories say about the nature of Jewishness, is another matter.
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