Wickedness and Wonders

By Paul Gray

THE COLLECTED STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 610 pages; $19.95

A hallmark of literary modernism is the notion that readers must earn their places at the feet of the masters. Serious art requires extended initiations; Finnegans Wake is not for the fainthearted, nor will Proust reward the impatient. Isaac Bashevis Singer, 77, began writing at about the time that this avant-garde assumption was hardening into orthodoxy, and somehow he never got the message. He went on with his work under the illusion that authors were still required to prove themselves to their audiences, and not the reverse. He told stories as if daring any of his listeners to nod off or leave the room. "It happened like this," he would begin urgently. When he sensed impending restlessness, he would insert a "To make a long story short" and pick up the pace, He practiced this old-fashioned bardic art for so long that it began to look brand-new.

One happy result of Singer's long career was the Nobel Prize, in 1978. This enchanting book is another. The Collected Stones is not exactly that; Singer selected 47 from the more than 100 he has written over the years. But the samples preserved include enough imps and demons, spiritual pilgrims and vivid Hasidim to satisfy the author's most fervent admirers.

All of Singer's favored settings are here, from small Polish villages named Frampol or Krasnobrdd to Warsaw's Krochmalna Street ("the part where the Jews lived") to Manhattan's Upper West Side, the neighborhood the author has called home for more than four decades. These specific locales bring forth universal truths. "One place is pretty much like another," says a character in The Destruction of Kreshev. "If they're on the face of the earth, they're all the same."

Certainly, no site seems immune to the peculiar magic of Singer's imagination. In The Gentleman from Cracow, a tiny town is given unaccustomed luxury and then led to ruin by a wealthy young man who is really "a creature covered with scales, with an eye in his chest, and on his forehead a horn that rotated at great speed." Supernatural beings stalk the cities as well. In The Power of Darkness, a Warsaw district receives strange tidings: "The word soon spread . . . that a dybbuk had settled in Tzeitel's ear, and that it chanted the Torah, sermonized, and crowed like a rooster." The narrator of The Cafeteria meets a woman who claims to have seen Adolf Hitler on upper Broadway. Her confidant is ultimately inclined to believe her: "Esther didn't sound insane. She had seen a piece of reality that the heavenly censorship prohibits as a rule. She had caught a glimpse behind the curtain of phenomena."

This glimpse is what Singer's stories constantly offer. To catch it, his readers are not required to believe in demonology but merely to agree that much of life is otherwise inexplicable. Why would a devout Jewish husband tempt his beautiful new bride into adultery with a loutish footman? What could prompt a spirited girl to masquerade as a yeshiva boy and then marry a village's most eligible heiress? In The Cabalist of East Broadway, a morose old Hebrew scholar suddenly abandons New York City for a young wife and fame in Israel. Just as suddenly, he returns alone to his old haunts. He tries to tell the narrator why: "Man does not live according to reason."

Faith is a substitute for logic, but not an easy one. Speaking in the late 1930s, an old German rabbi in The Joke proclaims: "The Nazis maintain that cannons are more important than butter, but we Jews, the people of the Book, still believe in the power of the word." Yet the orthodox in Singer's tales are the ones most likely to discover that the letter can kill. They are denied the ignorance of "ordinary people who because of their simplicity are spared bad luck and go through life without any real problems." Hence, a softhearted young man fails to become his village's rabbi, and is chosen instead as its ritual slaughterer; sickened by his work, he must wrestle with the question of whether or not a mortal can be more compassionate than God. In Joy, an aging rabbi mourns the death of his daughter and loses his faith. He concludes that "the atheists are right. There is no justice, no Judge." But one dark mystery is supplanted by another. His lost child appears and asks him to join her after Rosh Hashana. He resumes his duties and then dies with a message: "One should always be joyous."

Such optimism would seem empty if Singer did not test his characters so severely while they achieve it. His no-nonsense prose prohibits moral posturing. All of these stories were written first in Yiddish, a language that draws rough vitality from the vernacular; Singer has seen to it that his many translators preserve the outspoken qualities of the originals. (Gimpel the Fool was rendered in English by Saul Bellow, a rare instance of one future Nobel laureate transcribing another.) And the passage of time has ratified Singer's vision of the living and the dead busily coexisting. The places of many of his stories are no more, their inhabitants long since slaughtered or dispersed. But they exist on these pages, where people just like them can view themselves. To read The Collected Stories is to appreciate what the heroine of one of them learns: "The world crawled with wickedness, but it was also full of wonders.''

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"I am the Primeval Snake, the Evil One, Satan. The Cabala refers to me as Samael and the Jews sometimes call me merely 'that one.'

. . . I love to arrange strange marriages, delighting in such mismatings as an old man with a young girl, an unattractive widow with a youth in his prime, a cripple with a great beauty, a cantor with a deaf woman, a mute with a braggart. Let me tell you about one such 'interesting' union I contrived in Kreshev, which is a town on the river San, that enabled me to be properly abusive . . . "

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