Singer's Song of the Polish Past

By Paul Gray

SHOSHA by Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus & Giroux;277 pages; $8.95

Isaac Bashevis Singer's constant readers know well what his books promise: the sense of returning home to a place and a time that few now living ever inhabited. Over the breadth and span of nearly 30 volumes, writing originally in Yiddish, Singer has resuscitated the Poland that existed before World War I and then, precariously, between the wars. He has peopled his land with the folk he knew when he was growing up among them, creating in the process a nation of characters. Their names have changed from book to book and story to story, but they have remained fixed in their variety: rabbis and sinners, intellectuals and simpletons, rationalists and mystics, world savers and fatalists. Singer's art has transformed them all into uncommon clay.

Shosha, Singer's eighth novel, is thus a variation on a theme that the author has played many times before, and not a whitless enjoyable for that. Among his many accomplishments, Singer is a master at showing how familiarity can breed contentment. Here again is Warsaw when hailing a cab meant finding a horse-drawn droshky; here are the smells and sounds of Krochmalna Street, the intrigue and gossip at the Writers' Club, the dark, snowy vistas on the Vistula.

Aaron Greidinger, the hero and narrator, recapitulates the careers of other Singer characters and, in many small details, that of Singer himself. Growing up in Warsaw in the early years of this century, Aaron slowly disentangles himself from the strictures and teachings of his rabbi father and becomes attracted to secular philosophy and literature. As a young man he lives penuriously on what he can get by writing for the Yiddish-language newspapers. His other support is the warmth offered by a succession of women. Chief among these is Betty Slonim, an American actress with an old, wealthy impresario boyfriend and an itch to star on the Yiddish stage. With Hitler's invasion of Poland imminent, Betty represents Aaron's ticket to freedom, to America and to the riches that will be hers when her sponsor dies.

Instead, Aaron marries Shosha, a stunted, retarded girl he had known as a child. He knows exactly what this move means: "I was rejecting a woman of passion, of talent, with the capability of taking me to wealthy America, and condemning myself to poverty and death from a Nazi bullet." Why? It is the most frequent question in Singer's fiction and the one least frequently answered. Aaron offers tentative explanations to himself and others: loyalty to the past that Shosha shared with him, a mystic identification with her simplicity, even the conviction that Shosha is the one woman in the world who would never betray him. His act remains greater than the sum of its reasons.

Critics sometimes complain about how many of Singer's characters behave irrationally and about how many of his plots hinge on the machinations of dybbuks or the fist of fate. Such readers forget the most important ingredient in the ancient art of storytelling that Singer practices: wonder, awe at a world that can contain such deeds and such doers. Aaron echoes his creator when he complains about the cold passion for explanations: "Who says that everything nature or human nature does can be expressed in motives and words? I had been aware for a long time that literature could only describe facts or let the characters invent excuses for their acts. All motivations in fiction are either obvious or false."

Shosha is crammed with such absolute opinions, but to enjoy the book a reader does not have to agree with them. Singer is the least didactic of writers. His attention is always on making his characters do and say diverting things. Dr. Morris Feitelzohn, Aaron's mentor and friend, has only a small role in events, but his erudite, sardonic comments add enormously to the novel's texture: "I love the Jews even though I cannot stand them. No evolution could have created them. For me they are the only proof of God's existence."

Singer's dialogue is a reminder that once conversation meant more than banter on a TV talk show, that ideas were once as tangible and as nourishing as potatoes. That time is ended, and the people Singer celebrates were wiped out or dispersed. Yet they live. Several times Aaron toys with the notion that time is a book in which the dead exist on pages sim ply not legible to the living. Singer's books reverse this concept: they are time, lovingly preserved and animated by laughter and wisdom.

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A volume of Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoirs was published in March. A play, Teibele and Her Demon, co-authored by Singer and based on one of his short sto ries, has just premiered at Minneapolis' Guthrie theater. Now comes the novel Shosha. Few writers half Singer's 73 years are so prolific, and fewer still could write anything at all in the amiable chaos that surrounds him. "I get up in the morning," he says uncomplainingly, "and try to write between telephone calls."

That is the way he wants it. Despite worldwide fame (his books have been translated into nearly 60 languages), Singer remains a uniquely accessible celebrity. The phone rings constantly. Friends, fans and total strangers turn up at the roomy West Side Manhattan apartment that he shares with Alma, his wife for 38 years. They find a slightly stooped, nearly bald host with fine, parchment-like skin and strikingly pale blue eyes. He looks frail until he talks or moves, scuttling be tween sofa, telephone and front door with the vitality of a chipmunk.

Those who come to ask questions are surprised to find themselves being inter viewed instead. "I take from everything," he says of his writing, "like a little bird building a nest." Thus visitors often bring him gifts-- a fact, a mannerism, a speech habit -- that later appear in his fiction. Says Singer: "Many writers believe that they can make experiments by word combinations. The real experiments are the combinations made in nature. We should look inside this laboratory. I never fear that there will not be enough material. I get more than I can use."

Singer's method failed him only once, after he arrived in the U.S. in 1935. "I experienced six or seven years of literary impotence," he says. "For one thing, my Yiddish readers were old and I was still young. Also, I made a great mistake. I tried to write a novel about America before I really knew my subject. Since then I have always written about people who speak Yiddish or who come from Poland." Young writers who seek his advice hear this cautionary tale--and more. "Some beginners take themselves very, very seriously," he says. "I tell them not to be so conceited. Writers were not born to change the world. We cannot even make it worse."

This insistent modesty is part of Singer's long quarrel with artistic pretentiousness. "A writer is not a god," he insists. "He is someone with the talent to write a story that will entertain. It is not for us to explain life. Fiction can entertain and stir the mind; it does not direct it. If a preacher like Tolstoy could not help his people, we are not going to be helped by a lot of little preachers." Singer is reluctant, outside the area of his work, to suggest behavior to others. A vegetarian for the past 16 years, he refuses to proselytize. Asked if he took up the diet because of his health, he says, "I did it because of the health of the chickens."

Despite earnings of about $100,000 a year, Singer lives much the way he did when Alma clerked at Lord & Taylor to supplement their income. He points proudly to the typewriter outfitted with Yiddish characters that he has used for 43 years. He is also concerned that the flow of Singer works will make his readers grow tired of him. "I'd like to build up a little bank of literature," he says, "but not publish anything for a while. Keep quiet at least two years." His readers will certainly have some things to say about this.

Excerpt

"At No. 10 the balcony of what had been our apartment was hung with wash. It had once seemed so high to me, but now I could almost reach it with my fingers. I glanced into the stores. Where were Eli the grocer and his wife, Zeldele? Just as Eli was tall, quick, agile, sharp, and argumentative, Zeldele was small, slow-moving, dull, and good-natured, Zeldele had to be told twice what it was a customer wanted. For her to put out her hand, take a piece of paper, slice off a chunk of cheese and weigh it could take a quarter of an hour. If you asked her the cost, she began to mull it over and scratch under her wig with a hairpin. If the customer bought on credit and Zeldele marked down the amount, she couldn't make out later what she had written. When the war came and German marks ... came into use, she grew completely bewildered. Eli abused her in front of the customers and called her "Cow." She became sick during the war and they didn't manage to get her to a hospital. She lay down in bed and went off to sleep like a chick. Eli cried, wailed and beat his head against the wall. Three months later, he married a plump wench who was just as slow and tranquil as Zeldele."

--Paul Gray

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