Memories of a Polish Boyhood

IN MY FATHER'S COURT by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 307 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.50.

"There are still mysterious forces at work in the world," says Isaac Bashevis Singer. Dipping his pen in an inkwell of wonders, he has drawn out, in his demonic, forceful fiction (The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Short Friday), a fantastic and various vision of Eastern Europe's vanished Jewry. His work has already commandingly established him as the greatest living master of Yiddish prose and as one of the enduring leaders among U.S. novelists. Now 61, he has issued a memorable memoir of his Polish boyhood--a group of brief, incidental sketches that Singer first wrote in Yiddish for New York's Jewish Daily Forward. In translation they are brisk, bright and engagingly exotic. Even readers who have never heard a shofar will recognize the book as a letter from home.

Extra Cot. For the poor and pious Singer family, home stood at the head of a stinking, garbage-strewn Warsaw slum stairway. There Isaac Bashevis' red-bearded rabbi father (who chastely refused to look a woman in the face and could not, insists Author Singer, recognize his own wife) learnedly ruled his roost. He also ruled his rabbinical court, the Beth Din, an institution that dated from the days of Moses and was a blend of synagogue, law court and psychoanalyst's consulting room for the superstitious, the bereaved and the troubled. For Isaac Bashevis, it exemplified "the celestial council of justice, God's judgment, absolute mercy." One time a miserable pauper, who was forced to keep the corpse of his wife in his rat-ridden cellar room until it could be buried, asked if it were permitted a good Jew to sleep in the same bed with a body. The whole horrified neighborhood tumbled out compassionately with donations of food, clothing--and an extra cot. When an elderly penitent insisted that God would never forgive her for having long ago abandoned her illegitimate baby on the steps of a church, Rabbi Singer told her to fast, pray and give alms, and reminded her that God has no evil in him.

Only heresy really scandalized Father Singer, who kept as closely as possible within the confines of his own Orthodox home, rarely even stepping out onto the balcony. By 1914, all that was changing. While elderly rabbis dreamed up endless commentaries on the commentators on the law and books of wisdom, young intellectuals were turning socialist, reading Dostoevsky, shaving off their earlocks, or sailing for New York. Encouraged by his rebellious elder brother, I. J. Singer, young Bashevis thrust increasingly beyond the limits of his Orthodox childhood into the world of intellectuals and artists. He records with touching candor the delight he felt when as an adolescent he first wandered into the studio of a famous sculptor and discovered a stunning new society that honored the body as fervently as his father had honored the soul.

Portrait of the Kaiser. In the final fourth of his book, Author Singer bitingly recounts the collapse of Poland's 800-year-old Jewish community before the brisk and bitter winds of change in the years of World War I. One day in 1916, a group of rabbis was peremptorily summoned to Warsaw's city hall for a meeting with occupying German officials. The rabbis were terrified. Father Singer carefully bathed, prayed, donned his Sabbath best, and resignedly marched off to the meeting. Instead of catastrophe, he met only courtesy. Beneath a portrait of the Kaiser, an epauleted military doctor displayed a big picture of a louse, explained that it caused typhus, and reminded the rabbis that cleanliness accorded well with their religion. It is probably the last time in history that a German enjoined a Jew to better Judaism.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.