The 50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years
From the Kafkaesque to “Everything is Illuminated” and a childhood favorite: the 50 works of fiction by or about Jews that you must check out.By Jason Diamond / February 9, 2011
5331
Comments (145)
PRINT ARTICLE
Jews have done a pretty good job holding up our end of the “People of the Book” deal, especially over the last hundred years. Jewish writers from all over the globe have contributed fiction in a number of different languages, influencing the form in ways immeasurable, in turn helping to document the Jewish experience better than most history books.
Our criteria for this list was any work that could be considered “Jewish fiction”: written by a Jewish author or dealing heavily with Jewish topics and themes, all written in the last 100 years. Short story collections, plays, graphic novels and novellas were all taken into consideration. All publication dates reflect the American publication.
Think we missed something? Think something deserved a higher ranking than it got? We’re open to comments below.
1. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
It’s really impossible to rate anything– especially the ultimate “Kafkaesque” work—any higher. The Prague-born writer’s ultimate work about poor Gregor Samsa is one of the most seminal works of Jewish fiction in the last century.
2. In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust
Jews are naturally nostalgic folks, so simply replace the Madeleine with a rugelach and you might have one of the most Jewish works in literature. And yes, Proust was a Jew.
3. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
Trying to pick one book as the ultimate Philip Roth work isn’t as hard as you think. Portnoy is the book you see every new title compared to, even to this day. Goodbye, Columbus made him famous, but Portnoy made him a creepy god.
4. Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller
Miller’s play tells the tale of Willy Loman, but also works as the perfect parable of the death of the American Dream.
5. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
No list dealing with best fiction of the last century would be complete without Salinger’s ode to teenage angst, and the limited knowledge we have of the late writer tells us that this book was indeed the product of Jewish neurosis.
6. The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
We recognize that we should have just said “Everything Kafka did” at the #1 position, but that wouldn’t have been fair, now would it?
7. Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
It’s hard to pick Bellow’s masterwork, but we really have to go with the book that made mid-life crisis into an art form.
8. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) by Cynthia Ozick
Same as the Herzog: It’s nearly impossible to pick the greatest work from the Ozick canon, but for the sake of argument, we’re going to pick The Pagan Rabbi as the must read collection by this brilliant writer.
9. A Contract With God (1978) by Will Eisner
Some call it the first graphic novel. Others dispute that. Nobody denies this work’s greatness. Eisner’s semi-autobiographical short stories of Jewish life in The Bronx was called “something momentous,” by the LA Times.
10. Call it Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth
This is the quintessential Jewish experience of the ghetto known Lower East Side of the early 20th Century. They should issue it to students in Hebrew school.
11. Angels in America (1991) by Tony Kushner
It’s almost scary how lacking the 1990s were of “generation defining” art by Jews. Thankfully, Kushner’s tour de force play made up for that by being one of the greatest artistic works in the entire Western Canon, both literally and according to Harold Bloom.
12. The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982) by Isaac Bashevis Singer
We aren’t going to play around with the Nobel-winning writer. His short stories are the first place you need to go to experience his true greatness.
13. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon
The story of how Jews created the modern superhero might not be the most interesting idea for a story, but leave it in the hands of one of modern fiction’s greatest writers, and it’s an epic.
14. American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
15. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) by Judy Blume
A story about a girl growing up in an interfaith family, getting her first period, buying her first bra, and all the other fun issues that go along with being a teenager.
16. The Odessa Tales (1931) by Isaac Babel
If there is any justice in this world, Babel’s work would be mentioned along with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and any other great Russian writer you can think of. Until then, it’s undisputed that he’s certainly the greatest Jewish writer the country ever produced. These, his stories of Ukrainian tough guys in the waning days of Russian Empire, are his best.
17. The Assistant (1957) by Bernard Malamud
18. Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
In terms of the greatest dark humor anti-war novels, we’d pick Heller’s book over other Slaughterhouse Five or anything else you could think of.
19. The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936) by Israel Joshua Singer
We’ve stated on this website that Isaac Bashevis Singer was the most famous member of his family, but I.J. Singer was definitely the better writer. Here, with The Brothers Ashkenazi, he gave us one of the greatest snapshots of pre-World War 2 Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
20. Where the Wild Things Are (1963) by Maurice Sendak
Essential? Isn’t every child issued a copy of this when they’re born
21. The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
West (born Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein) gave us the great Hollywood novel through the eyes of unforgettable characters. The influence of this novel on writers from John Fante to Joan Didion is undeniable.
22. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) by Art Spiegelman
The only comic book to ever win the Pulitzer Prize. Art Spiegelman’s biography of his father’s life before, during and after the Holocaust, brought the medium to a whole new level.
23. Goodbye, Columbus (1959) by Philip Roth
24. The New York Trilogy (1987) by Paul Auster
If anybody is looking for the post-modern mystery book of the last thirty years, look no further.
25. The History of Love (2005) by Nicole Krauss
Krauss’ second novel that launched her into the literary spotlight, is the story of a very old man and a very young woman, and how their lives are joined by one very special book. (Check out our interview with Krauss)
26. The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant
The story of a holocaust survivor attempting to live with his demons will haunt you long after you’ve read it.
27. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) by Mordecai Richler
Henry Roth had the Lower East Side, Philip Roth New Jersey and Saul Bellow ruled over Chicago; but Richler wrote the greatest books about Jews in Montreal, and Duddy is his finest work.
28. Everything is Illuminated (2002) by Jonathan Safran Foer
Upon this book’s release, some called it “genius,” others said it was “overrated.” We’d like to say that it is one of the finest works of “Post-Holocaust Fiction.” Everything is Illuminated is a book for people who want to try and make some sense of the senseless.
29. Absurdistan: A Novel (2006) by Gary Shteyngart
As of the writing of this list, Mr. Shteyngart is 3for 3 in terms of great novels, but the story of the very rich and very rotund Misha Vainberg, is his masterpiece.
30.The Nimrod Flipout (2006) by Etgar Keret
31. The Man With the Golden Arm (1949) by Nelson Algren
32. The Street of Crocodiles (1936) by Bruno Schulz
Considered by many to be the greatest Polish writer of the 20th Century, Schulz’s masterwork is starting to peek back onto the cultural radar in the last ten years.
33. The Lazarus Project (2008) by Aleksander Hemon
The Bosnian-born Hemon might not be Jewish, but his novel juxtaposes a very autobiographical sounding protagonist with an immigrant Jew murdered in early 20th Century Chicago. The Lazarus Project is impeccably researched, and written so well, that you’d think Hemon had been speaking English his entire life.
34. Mind-Body Problem (1993) by Rebecca Goldstein
35. The Tenants of Moonbloom (1963) by Edward Lewis Wallant
We’d suggest reading Dave Eggers’ essay on the book to better understand.
36. Motherless Brooklyn (1999) by Jonathan Lethem
Is it fair for us to say that Lethem’s 1999 novel set the stage for the current literary renaissance going on in the borough of Brooklyn to this day? It certainly made the “Neuronovel” a trendy thing.
37. The Instructions (2010) by Adam Levin
If you’re going to make a big splash, write a 1000+ page book about a Jewish boy from the Chicago suburbs who might or might not be the Messiah. That’s what Levin did with his debut, and that’s why it was our favorite work of fiction in 2010.
38. The Trial of God (1995) by Elie Wiesel
39. Bech, a Book (1970) by John Updike
The king of the W.A.S.Ps parodies his Jewish contemporaries, and gives the world the greatest work of “Jew envy.”
40. The Best of Everything (1958) by Rona Jaffe
It could be argued that this was the Sex and the City of its time. But we think it’s so much more than that.
41. What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) by Budd Schulberg
Schulberg would go on to greater fame as a screewriter, but his story of Sammy Glick’s rise calls to mind The Day of the Locust, Dickens and Citizen Kane, and is a must read.
42. Comedy in a Minor Key (2010) by Hans Keilson
It took about 100 years, but Hans Keilson was finally recognized as one of the world’s greatest writers. This book about a young Dutch couple that takes in a sick Jewish man during World War 2–only to find themselves trying to figure out how to cover up his death–isn’t the sort of dark comedy that leaves you chuckling. It’s the sort that makes you exclaim, “that’s brilliant.”
43. Landscape in Concrete (1966) by Jakov Lind
A story written by a Jew who survived World War 2 by posing as a Dutch citizen writes a story about a Nazi soldier’s quixotic journey to rejoin the war after being declared mentally unstable to serve. Possibly the most absurd novel on this list.
44. Homeland (2004) by Sam Lipsyte
If you check back with us in ten years, Sam Lipsyte will have replaced Philip Roth as the writer that everybody copies – whether they know it or not. Bookslut described Lipsyte’s third book as “disturbing and comforting,” and summed up his style quite well.
45. The Finkler Question (2010) by Howard Jacobson
Salon said the underdog Man Booker winner in 2010 would “probably distress you on its way to disarming you. Can we pay the novel any greater compliment?” We don’t think so.
46. Seize the Day (1956) by Saul Bellow
47. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisneberg (2010) by Deborah Eisenberg
Eisenberg is one of the greatest living short story writers. Do yourself a favor and read everything.
48. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999) by Nathan Englander
49. Witz (2010) by Joshua Cohen
The Jewish Ulysses? Some have said that’s the case.
50. The Extra Man (1998) by Jonathan Ames
Tagged with:
Heartaches & limitations: A portrait of Isaac Bashevis Singer By Al Sundel ( Guest)
Isaac Bashevis Singer at home
Parts of this feature about Polish-born Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer first appeared in the now-defunct Partisan Review, under the title “Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer.” The piece is written by New York-based writer Al Sundel who knew Singer personally.
Singer was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement. He believed there was still an audience who longed to read stories in Yiddish. “I would not call myself the last Yiddish writer but I am certainly one of the last,” he told The New York Times Book Review in 1972. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. He died in 1991.
I first met Isaac Bashevis Singer shortly before he was mugged. He was then known as an ethnic writer only to a rather small circle of readers; the grand scheme of his writings was not yet apparent. He lived on Central Park West just above 100th Street, where the avenue starts a downscale dip. He entered his lobby elevator behind a black woman. As the door closed, her man inside put a gun to Singer’s head, speaking in dialect muddled by drugs. The woman lifted Singer’s wallet only to find a few dollars. The doper pushed the muzzle in Singer’s face, demanding more. He was flying so high his trigger hand tremored. In his own thick accent, Singer told him he didn’t have any more. It sounds comic, accents and all, but it was extremely life-threatening to a rare man who would, in time, win a Nobel Prize. The gun did not go off. Singer left the elevator in his usual shuffling style and the elevator door closed.
The next day Singer shopped for a new apartment. He resettled on West 72nd Street, before it became a gay zone, less than a block and a half from where John Lennon would live and be shot and killed. It was from this 72nd Street apartment that Singer came to know a wider international audience for his uniquely Jewish writings. The young Isaac Bashevis Singer began as both a Hasid and a modern-day Bruegel the Elder who gave us panoramic verbal folk tales. Entire communities came alive on his typewriter, mainly of a forgotten people in the past. Rural Hasids were not simply second-class citizens of Poland, in the gloom of their medieval caftans they were often looked down upon by more worldly Jews. Thus, Hasids were often not only beyond the pale in Christendom, but of mainstream Judaism.
The young Singer became a Hasidic vox populi, perhaps more than any predecessor. He wrote in his mother tongue, Yiddish. This living language was fed to the ovens, too, during the Holocaust. Once in America, the middle-age and elder Singer well knew he was writing of an obscure culture in a dying language. Yet his daily grind kept piling up more reams of fiction than Dickens or Dostoyevsky in a language that was breathing its last. He badly needed translators, even amateurs. Good ones in Yiddish were scarce; the money wasn’t there even to pay for indifferent ones. For beginners to translate Singer into English was akin to entry-level archaeology without boots.
Book publishers often helped with his numerous novels. But in order to move his voluminous short stories (well over 100), Singer had to draw on young admirers willing to put in the time. A friend of mine briefly took it on. He asked me to come along as he didn’t know Yiddish well and struggled with Singer’s metaphorical flights. The three of us sat close, hunched over a first-draft translation. Singer would explain what he meant by a paragraph troubling the translator. Then we took liberties to shape it into better Anglo. Multiple visits were needed to put a story to bed, while his wife Alma served coffee. As I didn’t know Yiddish and could not make all the visits necessary, I shot film and gave Singer blow-ups [enlargements of photographic images] to kind of pay my way.
Singer was disappointed with a contact sheet from his publisher’s photographer. The man had taken him to Central Park on a wintry day in a dark coat. The shots made Singer look like a rebel priest sitting chilled on a St Stephen’s Green bench in Dublin, angry at God. Singer chose one of mine, more homey. Years later, I came upon a second photo I took of Singer that I’d given him. It appeared in the NY Times Book Review running full page with the wrong credit line and no check. I didn’t bother to complain.
Coming from a Hasidic rabbinic background, the young Singer was familiar both with the backward countryside and the booming city of Warsaw. The Hasidic movement reached its apogee in Poland in the 18th century, a time when roving Cossack armies raided defenceless Jewish villages with the vilest savagery. Why didn’t the Poles do more to stop them? Nationalistic Poles like to say that Poland is the Christ among all nations. Behind the hype stands a shameless record of Christian anti-Semitism reaching to this day (e.g., the horrors of the Jedwabne pogrom, in which half a Polish town in 1941 murdered the other half for being Jewish). Shtetl Jews were caught between the heinous crimes of Cossacks, the express hostility of Poles and the disdain of worldly Jews.
The rural Hasids formed a populist Jewish sect characterised by clannish fundamentalism, a deep strain of mysticism, and often medieval apparel. Singer chronicled the transition of the rural 17th-century Hasids, through the generations, to urban positions of wealth and power in 20th-century Warsaw. His own life would in time come to exemplify the varied transitional stages from shtetl insularity in Poland to displaced person on bustling 72nd Street off Broadway. Early on, Singer wrote in Hebrew, then switched to Yiddish. As a transitional Hasid, he obviously also spoke Polish in Warsaw. In his twenties, he knew Western culture and German well enough to translate Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun and future prize winner Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, no less) into Yiddish. English appears to be his fifth language.
Medieval times came to an end in Western Europe circa 1492. But not for much of the planet. Eastern Europe stagnated in superstition (e.g., Dracula, wolf men, fertile ground for Frankenstein, exorcist magic, sightings in the sky, etc), especially in the outlying villages. It remained ‘Brueghelian’ well into the 20th century, as large parts of the world remain today; that is, eat, drink, fornicate and be superstitious. In Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto was more porous to the advances of Western culture. From Warsaw, Singer made 300-year leaps backwards to shtetls and forward again to the vims and vigours of urban intellectual life. In his shtetl stories, he juggled grassroots superstitions. He was not pushing his own occult beliefs. He was reporting what the country folk believed. In his Warsaw stories, he abandoned the supernatural and leaned more to transitional Jews whose mojo was rising in Western culture. This trend increased in his American stories, set in modern New York, Tel Aviv, Miami Beach, about uprooted East European Jews living banal middle-class lives without Cossacks, Poles or Nazis savagely attacking them.
Singer’s American stories remained at a far remove from the norms of American Jewish fiction. He did not write about the immigration experience (cf Henry Roth), or the assimilated Jew whose vestigial Jewishness resembled the human coccyx (cf Saul Bellow), a tail that had lost its tailness. He wrote about displaced persons. His Jews were displaced in rural Poland, displaced in New York City, displaced in Miami Beach. When they got to the big city, and especially in America, they metamorphosed. They got ‘melting-potitis.’ Singer’s characters were descended from biblical heroes. But they had schlepped their kitchen problems and heartaches with them, in multiple displacements from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and Judea. They had lost much of their timeline heritage along the way, except some high falutin’ parts. Though half the planet has read the Hebrew Bible, are there even 36 sages who truly understand the long view of 4,000 years of displacement? If sages could not comprehend it, what could you expect of the rest of us? Singer focused on human kitchen problems and heartaches. He tapestried 300 years of Jewish life from rural Poland to Warsaw to America almost as biblical addenda. He can be compared to a Babylonian Jew in the time of Ezra writing about centuries of exiled Jewish life in Assyria and Babylonia, only in far greater quantity than ever survived to our time.
The sheer amount of lonely sitting a prolific writer must put in is beyond most people’s endurance. You look up from the writing machine to the window at times as if to say, “Hello. Is anybody out there?” Aside from two Partisan Review stalwarts who early translated a story each of his, Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld, Singer was the most isolated of writers, a Yiddish Napoleon at Elba. He had minimal contact with fellow travellers of literary fiction. His folk past was his most trusted companion. Singer would in the end publish a lot because he wrote more than most important writers. Sometimes, as he was writing, he simultaneously conversed with his wife, a kind of soft marital babble as his fingers flicked over the keys. When several young people visited him, he might get a little giddy coming out of a writer’s self-imposed isolation. Yet he was formal. He preferred to be called “Mr Singer.” He usually wore a funeral dark suit, shiny from overuse, and a dull tie. On sultry evenings in the summer, if someone asked to remove a jacket, he rose and said, “We will all remove our jackets.” To receive you in his shirtsleeves, he had to know you well.
He lived at the bourgeois extreme from long-haired Greenwich Village types holed up in tenements with cracked bathtubs in the kitchen from 1912. He once showed me a five-foot painting sent by a female fan. It revealed a nude in a blue-speckled field that struck an emotional high note, like Munch’s “The Scream.” Singer said he didn’t know what to do with it. He kept it facing the wall, but his eyes glittered with a stifled giggle when he showed it.
Singer took deeper pleasure in his beloved pets, yellow parakeets, who might flutter around the living room or alight on him as if he were a tree. At these times, the briefest resemblance to a St Francis kindness to animals might light up his eyes. At his suggestion, Singer and I began to meet for lunch. He was cue-ball bald with soft white down behind the ears and ceramic-blue eyes that could shift from penetrating to waggish. He struck me as so grandfatherly, I imagined this aspect began prematurely at 45. He suggested I read Knut Hamsun, despite Hamsun’s having been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II (what good advice!).
We generally took a brisk walk to a hopping-busy cafeteria on Broadway in the 80s or else lunched in a coffee shop on 72nd Street. Here, amid fork-and-knife clatter, over matzoth brei, he might open up a little. Isaac Bashevis Singer had been burnt in his best years from having too much sensibility and not enough taste of life, love or money. To write a lot means to live little, to let the sun shine for others while you stay holed up in your cell. For decades, he feared he might one day grovel like Hamsun’s character in Hunger, eating his own shoe leather while a woman’s shapely image faded from the retina of his mind. His concept of dread was to suffer the fate of Poe. His main earning stream came from The Jewish Daily Forward, which published his briefs and fiction to an ever-dwindling Yiddish readership. His wife, Alma, held a not-so-fancy job in a department store. While he later claimed she didn’t need to work, I suspected it was just the opposite when I first met him. They were comfortable, but not yet secure.
For his first forty years, he lived in the long shadow of his brother, Isadore Joshua Singer, almost ten years older. Isaac Bashevis Singer (born Yitzak Hersh Singer) was the third child behind a sister, Esther (who also wrote fiction), and he had a younger brother, Moses. I J Singer shot out of the blocks in the early ’30s to become known locally as a natural talent that flowed like the Vistula. He was quickly discovered by The Jewish Daily Forward, who brought him to America.
To this day, some readers prefer I J Singer to I B Singer. I J Singer was published in the US in the ’30s by Liveright and Knopf, then the two most prestigious American publishers. He wrote socially conscious novels about what life was really like behind ghetto and shtetl walls, tales that Sholem Aleichem was too Broadway and schmaltzy to handle. Here was a different voice than Yiddish literature had heard before, and a completely different kind of Hasid who shucked his medieval caftan and looked like the rest of the modern world. He wrote with bite. I J Singer spoke in the detailed and humane-conscience tone of Dreiser, an American Catholic. Both I J and Dreiser tied in to the prophetic tradition of Judaism, borrowing a little from Jeremiah, but in softened tones of muted outrage. I J Singer dug deep into the psychic vein of characters and society. It is not a stretch to describe I J Singer’s vision as Tolstoyan (though he preferred Stendhal) and his talent as huge. Were he mainstream Christian instead of subset Hasid in the Jewish ghetto in anti-Semitic Poland, he would have been an overnight international sensation. Water the flower and it will grow. He was on drip irrigation.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote more like a rational mystic, in itself a contradiction. The two sides warred in him. He was deeply intelligent yet avoided showing it, preferring a humble voice and simple characters. Yet he could peer over the precipice and see the murk below. He leaned a little toward the black humour of the regional champion, Gogol (e.g., in Gogol’s short story, “The Nose,” where a man wakes up one morning, discovers his nose missing and goes looking for it, to find it parading about the streets in the man’s cloak with a bluster of a VIP). Above all, Bashevis Singer’s fiction teemed with characters harried by the myriad slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, including life’s many spear thrusts of deceit. (A man climbs in the window of a woman late at night, convinces her he is a ghost who should not be disturbed, gets into bed with her, then leaves — to return on an as-needed basis.) His rural characters seem to float willy-nilly in a timeless stream that included the ether around them. Did it make any difference whether they lived in Bruegel’s era or today in Miami Beach? Not really. The same things happened to them, but far less brutally and superstitiously in America. Only after his death could we fully appreciate what Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing: chronicling the Hasidic saga inside the Wild West (East) of Christendom. In doing so, he rendered the chicken fat of the worldwide human heart.
Heartaches & limitations: A portrait of Isaac Bashevis Singer By Al Sundel ( Guest)
Isaac Bashevis Singer at home | Photo credit: Al Sundel
Parts of this feature about Polish-born Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer first appeared in the now-defunct Partisan Review, under the title “Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer.” The piece is written by New York-based writer Al Sundel who knew Singer personally.
Singer was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement. He believed there was still an audience who longed to read stories in Yiddish. “I would not call myself the last Yiddish writer but I am certainly one of the last,” he told The New York Times Book Review in 1972. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. He died in 1991.
I first met Isaac Bashevis Singer shortly before he was mugged. He was then known as an ethnic writer only to a rather small circle of readers; the grand scheme of his writings was not yet apparent. He lived on Central Park West just above 100th Street, where the avenue starts a downscale dip. He entered his lobby elevator behind a black woman. As the door closed, her man inside put a gun to Singer’s head, speaking in dialect muddled by drugs. The woman lifted Singer’s wallet only to find a few dollars. The doper pushed the muzzle in Singer’s face, demanding more. He was flying so high his trigger hand tremored. In his own thick accent, Singer told him he didn’t have any more. It sounds comic, accents and all, but it was extremely life-threatening to a rare man who would, in time, win a Nobel Prize. The gun did not go off. Singer left the elevator in his usual shuffling style and the elevator door closed.
The next day Singer shopped for a new apartment. He resettled on West 72nd Street, before it became a gay zone, less than a block and a half from where John Lennon would live and be shot and killed. It was from this 72nd Street apartment that Singer came to know a wider international audience for his uniquely Jewish writings. The young Isaac Bashevis Singer began as both a Hasid and a modern-day Bruegel the Elder who gave us panoramic verbal folk tales. Entire communities came alive on his typewriter, mainly of a forgotten people in the past. Rural Hasids were not simply second-class citizens of Poland, in the gloom of their medieval caftans they were often looked down upon by more worldly Jews. Thus, Hasids were often not only beyond the pale in Christendom, but of mainstream Judaism.
The young Singer became a Hasidic vox populi, perhaps more than any predecessor. He wrote in his mother tongue, Yiddish. This living language was fed to the ovens, too, during the Holocaust. Once in America, the middle-age and elder Singer well knew he was writing of an obscure culture in a dying language. Yet his daily grind kept piling up more reams of fiction than Dickens or Dostoyevsky in a language that was breathing its last. He badly needed translators, even amateurs. Good ones in Yiddish were scarce; the money wasn’t there even to pay for indifferent ones. For beginners to translate Singer into English was akin to entry-level archaeology without boots.
Book publishers often helped with his numerous novels. But in order to move his voluminous short stories (well over 100), Singer had to draw on young admirers willing to put in the time. A friend of mine briefly took it on. He asked me to come along as he didn’t know Yiddish well and struggled with Singer’s metaphorical flights. The three of us sat close, hunched over a first-draft translation. Singer would explain what he meant by a paragraph troubling the translator. Then we took liberties to shape it into better Anglo. Multiple visits were needed to put a story to bed, while his wife Alma served coffee. As I didn’t know Yiddish and could not make all the visits necessary, I shot film and gave Singer blow-ups [enlargements of photographic images] to kind of pay my way.
Photo credit: Al Sundel
Singer was disappointed with a contact sheet from his publisher’s photographer. The man had taken him to Central Park on a wintry day in a dark coat. The shots made Singer look like a rebel priest sitting chilled on a St Stephen’s Green bench in Dublin, angry at God. Singer chose one of mine, more homey. Years later, I came upon a second photo I took of Singer that I’d given him. It appeared in the NY Times Book Review running full page with the wrong credit line and no check. I didn’t bother to complain.
Coming from a Hasidic rabbinic background, the young Singer was familiar both with the backward countryside and the booming city of Warsaw. The Hasidic movement reached its apogee in Poland in the 18th century, a time when roving Cossack armies raided defenceless Jewish villages with the vilest savagery. Why didn’t the Poles do more to stop them? Nationalistic Poles like to say that Poland is the Christ among all nations. Behind the hype stands a shameless record of Christian anti-Semitism reaching to this day (e.g., the horrors of the Jedwabne pogrom, in which half a Polish town in 1941 murdered the other half for being Jewish). Shtetl Jews were caught between the heinous crimes of Cossacks, the express hostility of Poles and the disdain of worldly Jews.
The rural Hasids formed a populist Jewish sect characterised by clannish fundamentalism, a deep strain of mysticism, and often medieval apparel. Singer chronicled the transition of the rural 17th-century Hasids, through the generations, to urban positions of wealth and power in 20th-century Warsaw. His own life would in time come to exemplify the varied transitional stages from shtetl insularity in Poland to displaced person on bustling 72nd Street off Broadway. Early on, Singer wrote in Hebrew, then switched to Yiddish. As a transitional Hasid, he obviously also spoke Polish in Warsaw. In his twenties, he knew Western culture and German well enough to translate Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun and future prize winner Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, no less) into Yiddish. English appears to be his fifth language.
Medieval times came to an end in Western Europe circa 1492. But not for much of the planet. Eastern Europe stagnated in superstition (e.g., Dracula, wolf men, fertile ground for Frankenstein, exorcist magic, sightings in the sky, etc), especially in the outlying villages. It remained ‘Brueghelian’ well into the 20th century, as large parts of the world remain today; that is, eat, drink, fornicate and be superstitious. In Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto was more porous to the advances of Western culture. From Warsaw, Singer made 300-year leaps backwards to shtetls and forward again to the vims and vigours of urban intellectual life. In his shtetl stories, he juggled grassroots superstitions. He was not pushing his own occult beliefs. He was reporting what the country folk believed. In his Warsaw stories, he abandoned the supernatural and leaned more to transitional Jews whose mojo was rising in Western culture. This trend increased in his American stories, set in modern New York, Tel Aviv, Miami Beach, about uprooted East European Jews living banal middle-class lives without Cossacks, Poles or Nazis savagely attacking them.
Singer’s American stories remained at a far remove from the norms of American Jewish fiction. He did not write about the immigration experience (cf Henry Roth), or the assimilated Jew whose vestigial Jewishness resembled the human coccyx (cf Saul Bellow), a tail that had lost its tailness. He wrote about displaced persons. His Jews were displaced in rural Poland, displaced in New York City, displaced in Miami Beach. When they got to the big city, and especially in America, they metamorphosed. They got ‘melting-potitis.’ Singer’s characters were descended from biblical heroes. But they had schlepped their kitchen problems and heartaches with them, in multiple displacements from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and Judea. They had lost much of their timeline heritage along the way, except some high falutin’ parts. Though half the planet has read the Hebrew Bible, are there even 36 sages who truly understand the long view of 4,000 years of displacement? If sages could not comprehend it, what could you expect of the rest of us? Singer focused on human kitchen problems and heartaches. He tapestried 300 years of Jewish life from rural Poland to Warsaw to America almost as biblical addenda. He can be compared to a Babylonian Jew in the time of Ezra writing about centuries of exiled Jewish life in Assyria and Babylonia, only in far greater quantity than ever survived to our time.
Photo credit: Al Sundel
The sheer amount of lonely sitting a prolific writer must put in is beyond most people’s endurance. You look up from the writing machine to the window at times as if to say, “Hello. Is anybody out there?” Aside from two Partisan Review stalwarts who early translated a story each of his, Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld, Singer was the most isolated of writers, a Yiddish Napoleon at Elba. He had minimal contact with fellow travellers of literary fiction. His folk past was his most trusted companion. Singer would in the end publish a lot because he wrote more than most important writers. Sometimes, as he was writing, he simultaneously conversed with his wife, a kind of soft marital babble as his fingers flicked over the keys. When several young people visited him, he might get a little giddy coming out of a writer’s self-imposed isolation. Yet he was formal. He preferred to be called “Mr Singer.” He usually wore a funeral dark suit, shiny from overuse, and a dull tie. On sultry evenings in the summer, if someone asked to remove a jacket, he rose and said, “We will all remove our jackets.” To receive you in his shirtsleeves, he had to know you well.
He lived at the bourgeois extreme from long-haired Greenwich Village types holed up in tenements with cracked bathtubs in the kitchen from 1912. He once showed me a five-foot painting sent by a female fan. It revealed a nude in a blue-speckled field that struck an emotional high note, like Munch’s “The Scream.” Singer said he didn’t know what to do with it. He kept it facing the wall, but his eyes glittered with a stifled giggle when he showed it.
Singer took deeper pleasure in his beloved pets, yellow parakeets, who might flutter around the living room or alight on him as if he were a tree. At these times, the briefest resemblance to a St Francis kindness to animals might light up his eyes. At his suggestion, Singer and I began to meet for lunch. He was cue-ball bald with soft white down behind the ears and ceramic-blue eyes that could shift from penetrating to waggish. He struck me as so grandfatherly, I imagined this aspect began prematurely at 45. He suggested I read Knut Hamsun, despite Hamsun’s having been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II (what good advice!).
We generally took a brisk walk to a hopping-busy cafeteria on Broadway in the 80s or else lunched in a coffee shop on 72nd Street. Here, amid fork-and-knife clatter, over matzoth brei, he might open up a little. Isaac Bashevis Singer had been burnt in his best years from having too much sensibility and not enough taste of life, love or money. To write a lot means to live little, to let the sun shine for others while you stay holed up in your cell. For decades, he feared he might one day grovel like Hamsun’s character in Hunger, eating his own shoe leather while a woman’s shapely image faded from the retina of his mind. His concept of dread was to suffer the fate of Poe. His main earning stream came from The Jewish Daily Forward, which published his briefs and fiction to an ever-dwindling Yiddish readership. His wife, Alma, held a not-so-fancy job in a department store. While he later claimed she didn’t need to work, I suspected it was just the opposite when I first met him. They were comfortable, but not yet secure.
For his first forty years, he lived in the long shadow of his brother, Isadore Joshua Singer, almost ten years older. Isaac Bashevis Singer (born Yitzak Hersh Singer) was the third child behind a sister, Esther (who also wrote fiction), and he had a younger brother, Moses. I J Singer shot out of the blocks in the early ’30s to become known locally as a natural talent that flowed like the Vistula. He was quickly discovered by The Jewish Daily Forward, who brought him to America.
To this day, some readers prefer I J Singer to I B Singer. I J Singer was published in the US in the ’30s by Liveright and Knopf, then the two most prestigious American publishers. He wrote socially conscious novels about what life was really like behind ghetto and shtetl walls, tales that Sholem Aleichem was too Broadway and schmaltzy to handle. Here was a different voice than Yiddish literature had heard before, and a completely different kind of Hasid who shucked his medieval caftan and looked like the rest of the modern world. He wrote with bite. I J Singer spoke in the detailed and humane-conscience tone of Dreiser, an American Catholic. Both I J and Dreiser tied in to the prophetic tradition of Judaism, borrowing a little from Jeremiah, but in softened tones of muted outrage. I J Singer dug deep into the psychic vein of characters and society. It is not a stretch to describe I J Singer’s vision as Tolstoyan (though he preferred Stendhal) and his talent as huge. Were he mainstream Christian instead of subset Hasid in the Jewish ghetto in anti-Semitic Poland, he would have been an overnight international sensation. Water the flower and it will grow. He was on drip irrigation.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote more like a rational mystic, in itself a contradiction. The two sides warred in him. He was deeply intelligent yet avoided showing it, preferring a humble voice and simple characters. Yet he could peer over the precipice and see the murk below. He leaned a little toward the black humour of the regional champion, Gogol (e.g., in Gogol’s short story, “The Nose,” where a man wakes up one morning, discovers his nose missing and goes looking for it, to find it parading about the streets in the man’s cloak with a bluster of a VIP). Above all, Bashevis Singer’s fiction teemed with characters harried by the myriad slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, including life’s many spear thrusts of deceit. (A man climbs in the window of a woman late at night, convinces her he is a ghost who should not be disturbed, gets into bed with her, then leaves — to return on an as-needed basis.) His rural characters seem to float willy-nilly in a timeless stream that included the ether around them. Did it make any difference whether they lived in Bruegel’s era or today in Miami Beach? Not really. The same things happened to them, but far less brutally and superstitiously in America. Only after his death could we fully appreciate what Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing: chronicling the Hasidic saga inside the Wild West (East) of Christendom. In doing so, he rendered the chicken fat of the worldwide human heart.
Al Sundel is an author and writer based in New York. He has published six ebook novels and two non-fiction books. He has written for Partisan Review, Nation and Sewanee Review. Al has produced taped seminars on Shakespeare, Kafka and Dostoyevsky. He has also worked on a number of medical/psychiatric advertising projects for companies such as Merck, Roche and Pfizer. Al is president of Al Sundel & Associates.
9. A Contract With God (1978) by Will Eisner
13. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon
17. The Assistant (1957) by Bernard Malamud
24. The New York Trilogy (1987) by Paul Auster
27. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) by Mordecai Richler
39. Bech, a Book (1970) by John Updike
47. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisneberg (2010) by Deborah Eisenberg