Fiddler

By Stefan Kanfer

PASSIONS by ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER 312 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

At the end of Chekhov's story Rothschild's Fiddle, a Russian wills his violin to a Jew. Afterward, writes Chekhov, Rothschild plays a melody "so passionately sad and full of grief that the listeners weep ... and force him to play it as many as ten times." In Passions, Isaac Bashevis Singer's new collection, all 20 tales recall the earlier story, with its Russian theme transmuted by vibrant Yiddish inflection.

To Singer adherents, the characters and settings are as familiar as repertory theater. Ancient Hasidic tales are informed with contemporary psychology and wit; fables are folded over so that the moral appears in the middle; plots are peopled with men and women of the Old World, resettled in New York or Miami or Buenos Aires, denizens of the apartments and cafes that Kafka termed the catacombs of the Jews.

Singer's new production is aptly named. At 71, the author remains one of the least explicit but most sexually charged of modern writers. In Old Love, an ancient millionaire rediscovers his amatory instincts--only to have his young mistress plunge from a window. In The Witch, an ungainly schoolgirl enchants a repressed intellectual until at last he seizes her, "a witch drenched in blood and semen, a monster that the rising sun transformed into a beauty."

Singer's work sometimes drops precipitously from reasoned metaphysics to unexamined mysticism. In ghost stories, where everything is possible for the narrator, too little is plausible for the reader. It is in his least adorned works that the mysteries of affection and identity are hauntingly stated. Sam Palka and David Vishkover, for example, is not merely the richest tale in Passions, but one of the most provocative short fictions of the last decade. In his customary role, Sam Palka, self-made entrepreneur, swaggers through a career of indulgence. In off-hours he assumes the role of Vishkover, a modest sewing machine salesman who courts the unprepossessing Channah Basha. As the miserably married Palka, Sam owns the very building in which Channah lives; as the bachelor Vishkover, he is incapable of force or originality. But it is here that his best self survives, a peasant from the other side, unsophisticated and uncorrupted by ambition or guile. Decades later, when Palka's wife dies, he still cannot bring himself to reveal his true identity. "Who is Sam Palka?" he asks himself. "An old lecher who has made a fortune and doesn't know what to do with it. David Vishkover is a man like my father, peace be with him. Well -- and what would happen to Channah Basha if she should hear the truth? Instead of becoming Sam Palka's wife, she would become David Vishkover's widow."

In this study of duality, Singer recalls the psychological explorations of James, Stevenson and Conrad. Yet it is none of these authors whom he most resembles. In the illumination of the ordinary, in the acuity of his observations, Singer is sounding a theme that has not been heard in a hundred years. Bending close to the page, the reader can see the characters of Anton Chekhov -- and hear once again the passionate wail of Rothschild's fiddle.

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