SOURCE: Milbauer, Asher Z. “I. B. Singer: The Convergence of Art and Faith.” In Transcending Exile: Conrad, Nabokov, I. B. Singer, pp. 73-120. Miami: Florida International University Press, 1985.

[In the excerpt below, Milbauer focuses on Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel Shosha as a vehicle for the writer's commenting both on his own destiny as an exile and on the collective destiny of the Jewish people.]

Binele, I won't abandon you. I swear by the soul of your mother.

I. B. Singer, “The Lecture”

I will make it so you will live forever.

I. B. Singer, Shosha

In 1967, in the December issue of Playboy magazine, I. B. Singer published one of his best short stories, “The Lecture.” This short piece, included later in the collection The Seance and Other Stories, can rightfully stand as an epigraph for the Yiddish writer's entire literary production. The theme of an exiled writer's efforts to relate his own past experience (as well as that of the entire Jewish nation) to the life of the present is a constant ingredient of both his novels and stories. “The Lecture” is a paradigm of it all.

The plot of the short story is as straightforward and uncomplicated as that of the majority of Singer's writings. But this simplicity will not deceive an attentive reader; it adds dimension and strength to the sincerity, agony, tragedy, and deep pain embedded in each word, sentence, and paragraph. I begin with this story not only because of its representative character in Singer's work, but because it bears a remarkable and revealing resemblance to Nabokov's novel Pnin, both in theme and in plot.

In the opening scenes of both the story and the novel, we encounter the main protagonists, N. and Pnin, two intellectuals, two exiled authors, who are on their way to deliver lectures to audiences who represent a vanished but still haunting past. (Nabokov would have been delighted at the coincidence that both he and Singer's character share the same initial letter in their names.) Letting the reader penetrate the minds of Pnin and N., the writers reveal an initially startling similarity in the patterns of their thinking as well as in the nature of the problems that obsess them. Both Pnin and N. are worried about their money, their passports, and their manuscripts, which, needless to say, get lost on their way to exotic, faraway places. Both find it necessary to describe in detail their journey on the train, meticulously pointing out all the complications that befall them. They share identical feelings of isolation and alienation from their fellow travelers. But, most important, the two exiled writers are constantly brooding about their past experiences, which they thought they would be able to leave behind them when forced to leave Eastern Europe. Both Pnin and N. return often in their reminiscences to the Holocaust and Stalin's purges—the two catastrophes that have so radically changed the course of events in the twentieth century. Both direct as well as indirect encounters with these events played a major role in turning the two writers into exiles. It is not just a mere coincidence, therefore, that both should respond similarly to the European cataclysms that had disrupted their personal lives and altered the destinies of their people.

Singer and Nabokov use identical techniques to convey the sense of tragedy, a permanent companion to exiled intellectuals, over the loss of a world that is no more. Scenes of the present invariable evoke Pnin's and N.'s reminiscences. Frequently, both in the story and in the novel, the distinctions between past and present are blurred, and it remains the reader's task, in order to gain a better insight into the texts, to distinguish the two planes of existence that are so intricately intertwined and often indiscernible. But, as I hope to show, it is even more important for the two protagonists to be able not only to disentangle their experiences but also to balance past and present, thus establishing an equilibrium that will ensure their intellectual survival.

While waiting to board his train, N. feels alienated from his fellow travelers: “It was as if they knew nothing of the existence of world problems or eternal questions, as though they had never heard of death, sickness, war, poverty, betrayal, or even such troubles as missing a train, losing a ticket, or being robbed.”¹ In this condensed statement, Singer makes a veiled reference to a horrible past that means nothing to N.'s new countrymen, Americans.

N.'s lecture is to deal with the future of Yiddish as a language. He is going to argue for optimism about the survival of this language, despite the fact that the Holocaust reduced by several million the number of its speakers. As a result of the Holocaust, Yiddish has, paradoxically, turned into a holy language, lashon hakodesh, thus taking the place of Hebrew, which became the everyday language in the state of Israel. Although N.'s predictions are going to be optimistic, he has doubts about his presentation; the closer the train brings him to his destination the deeper his doubts become. His mental changes are paralleled by the physical changes on the train. The feelings of comfort and the relaxing heat of the compartment give way to restlessness and the discomforting cold. When the train suddenly breaks down and the freezing winter temperatures begin to penetrate its every corner, the narrator's thoughts turn more often to his past, to Poland, to the people he will never see again. The sense of isolation becomes more acute; the only means he has to warm himself is the bottle of cognac that he was wise enough to bring with him from New York.

It is past midnight when the train finally pulls into the depot. The station is abandoned and covered by a white carpet of deep snow. The cold is miserable; N. is on the verge of despair. But suddenly he notices two figures, whom he instinctively approaches. The two women, mother and daughter, are the only ones who waited for the renowned Yiddish writer to arrive. Hardly have they exchanged greetings, when the mother, a “lame woman,” is already talking about dreadful and traumatic experiences in the displaced persons' camps, relating in frightful detail the fate of her family. The younger woman, Binele, who is herself survivor of Auschwitz, tries to calm her mother. But the daughter's admonitions are of no avail—nothing can silence her mother, who was so impatiently waiting for the great Yiddish author precisely in order to pour her heart out. Her behavior implies that she places high hopes on N., since only a true artist is able to perceive and fully comprehend the grief which has never ceased to torture her.

Survivors, Singer suggests, cannot be quiet, and even when they are, their silence sometimes assumes more meaning than volumes written by the most eloquent writers. N. knows that it is his duty to listen and to absorb everything this tragic figure, this miraculously saved remnant of the past, has to relate to him and, through him, to the entire world. The blood-chilling stories do nothing to relieve his feelings of cold. The frost becomes nearly unbearable to him. This sensation of cold is intensified when N. enters the tiny, run-down house of the two survivors where he is to spend the night. As if the cold were not enough to make him miserable, N. suddenly becomes aware that he has lost his manuscript; he is not even sure whether he still has his citizenship papers; he feels as if he is getting pneumonia. Suddenly he becomes conscious of painfully familiar odors that assail him from all the corners of the little house that evoke images from the past better forgotten. N. does not even try to fight them off; like Pnin, he cannot forget the unforgettable; he cannot and probably does not want to run away from the impressions that the old woman's Holocaust stories make on him.

Failing to overcome insomnia, unable to warm up even under three layers of blankets, N. tries consciously to get the feeling of what it meant to live through the Nazi atrocities: “Well, let me imagine that I remained under Hitler in wartime. Let me get some taste of that, too” (pp. 76-77). And as if to answer his call for a complete identification with the survivors, fate plays a foul trick on the narrator; in the middle of the night the old woman suddenly dies. Terror strikes N. when he hears the heartbreaking, horror-filled lamentations of the daughter. Now, indeed, he seems to comprehend fully what it means to be a victim, misunderstood, forgotten, ignored by the entire world. A neighbor, when solicited for help, is quite indifferent to what has just happened one floor below his apartment. Not only does he fail to grasp the tragedy of the situation, but, in addition, he cannot or does not want to understand English. Singer here suggests that the present circumstances are analogous to those in the past; then there was no common language between the victim and the outside world, a world that did nothing to prevent the destruction of almost a whole nation.

This event in the present gives rise to N.'s thoughts about the past: “My years in America seemed to have been swept away by that one night and I was taken back, as though by magic, to my worst days in Poland, to the bitterest crisis of my life” (p. 81). The present is inseparable from the past. The death of this survivor indicates to the narrator, and to Singer as well, that a true artist cannot keep silent about the events of the past, that it is his moral duty to relate the Holocaust experience to those who care to know. This is the legacy that N. inherits from the old woman. At once, looking at the tattoed number on Binele's wrist, he proudly accepts the bittersweet burden of the rememberer. At the deathbed of yet another Nazi victim, N. gives his solemn oath to the six million Jewish people, who cannot, unfortunately, be among his readers and listeners: “‘Binele, I won't abandon you. I swear by the soul of your mother’” (p. 83). And only at this moment does the cold finally let up and the snow begin to melt. The artist, thus, becomes the only true intermediary between the past and present.

I. B. Singer did not break the promise made by his double to Binele and her mother. He knew that the delayed death of a miraculously saved soul was an unequivocal message to a Yiddish writer, an outcry not to forget, a plea to commemorate through art not only the tragic events of the past but also the endurance and the vital powers of the Jewish people. Singer's novel Shosha can be justly regarded as his protagonist's fulfillment of the commitment he made at the deathbed of Binele's mother. N.'s pledge to never forget resounds in Aaron Gredinger's oath to Shosha to remember her forever, not to “forget anything,” and to “make it so that [she'll] live forever.”²

Prior to being published as a full-length novel in 1978, Shosha was serialized in the New York—based Yiddish newspaper, The Forward, under the title Soul Expeditions. (Why the book's title was changed will become clear later.) The name Shosha is familiar to most of Singer's readers: he has devoted an entire chapter to this “image” of his past in his compilation of children's stories A Day of Pleasure; he also mentions her several times in his memoir, In My Father's Court. His insistence on having this character reappear time and again in his literary works should put Singer's reader on alert. Fortunately, Singer is not writing a detective novel, and he has no intention of keeping the reader in suspense in regard to Shosha's frequent appearances in his fiction. In the novel, Betty, one of Aaron's numerous mistresses, asks him what he sees in Shosha that he should be so drawn to her. His answer is curt and defeatingly sincere: he sees in Shosha himself, that is, his past, which, as becomes clear later, is inseparable from his present existence.

Shosha is not a simple novel. One can wholeheartedly sympathize with Aaron's agonies when writing his play, The Lubomir Maiden, which, according to his own admission, contained a “magical theme—like the Torah, it seemed to possess seventy different faces” (p. 58). Shosha too is a multifaceted book, a large canvas, that betrays the author's ambition to incorporate into it the many elements scattered through all his novels and stories, as well as to add new dimenions to his literary activity. Shosha summarizes what he has done in his entire literary career; in other words, the novel is yet another fictionalized memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Like Nabokov's Mary, Shosha is a novel about the birth of an artist.

Biography and fiction are nearly indistinguishable in Shosha. Edward Alexander, in his full-length book, I. B. Singer, points out that Shosha is Singer's first novel published in English that is written as a first-person narrative.³ This fact, coupled with the reader's awareness of the publication of A Young Man in Search of Love, a nonfictional Singer memoir issued almost simultaneously with Shosha, adds to the impression that Shosha is a fictional autobiography. Indeed, when one compares the memoir and the novel, one cannot help noticing how much of what is in the memoir finds its way into the novel.

Both the book and the memoir address themselves to questions invariably posed by young, aspiring artists. What is the purpose of literature? What should one write about? How is one to translate into writing the creative powers one possesses? The list of inquiries can go on endlessly; these questions are ageless. But what makes the complexities of the problems raised by Singer's doubles even more pointed is the reader's singular awareness of the historical circumstances under which a Singerian artist has to function.

Most of the events in Shosha take place in the nineteen twenties and thirties, that is, the years between the two world wars. The place is Poland; the main characters are Jews. Hasidism, a Jewish mystical movement founded in Poland in about 1750 in opposition to rationalism and ritual laxity, and the movement of Haskalah or Enlightenment become the two poles of thinking within the Jewish population of Poland. There are those who advocate the traditional way of life, that is, the way of life to which Polish Jews were accustomed during the eight centuries of exile in that country. On the other hand, there emerges an ever-growing segment of mostly young people who want to leave the ghettos and whose search for a new identity places them in extreme opposition to their upbringing. They want worldliness, assimilation, enlightenment.

To be sure, neither of these groups is homogeneous in its demands and visions of the future. Even the Hasidim, proponents of the traditional, are not like their fathers who established the tradition. Bashele, Shosha's mother, sums it up this way: “‘There are no such Jews anymore. Even Hasidim dress like dandies today—cutaway gaberdines, polished boots’” (p. 78). The divergences among the enlightened Jews are no less noticeable. For some, Soviet Russia and its socioeconomic structure is the only model to follow; Stalin is often portrayed as a savior of the world from the evils that beset it. Others advocate total assimilation, announcing thus the inconsequentiality of the two thousand years of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Yet another group calls upon the Jews to return to the Holy Land and build a state that will express the new Jewish identity and consciousness.

But all of these impassioned theories of change and newness are overshadowed by constant feelings of doubt and ambivalence. Somewhere deep in their minds and hearts, these people are conscious of the futility of their efforts to escape their heritage. Aaron's pointed observation aptly expresses the essence of the state of mind of those around him: “We are running away and Mount Sinai runs after us. This chase has made us sick and mad” (p. 255). The significance of this statement is heightened when one rememebers that the sinister shadow of Nazi Germany has by this time covered nearly all Europe. In consequence of this, Polish Jewry feels that it is gradually becoming entrapped between the forces of Polish Panslavic anti-Semitism and Hitler's destructive force that threatens its annihilation.

It is in these times and under such circumstances that Aaron Greidinger firmly decides to become a writer and devote his life to art. Like Singer, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, Aaron “was brought up on three dead languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish … and a culture that developed in Babylon: the Talmud” (p. 1). In this very first sentence of the novel, Singer points out the two problems that are inseparable companions of any transplanted writer, namely, language and exile. The influence of his home, deeply steeped in tradition, is apparent in all Singer's writings. Aaron's home is identical to Singer's. From an early age the boy had a strong urge to write. He once confided to Shosha, who lived in the same apartment house on Krochmalna Street, that he “was writing a book” (p. 7). As a teenager, Aaron was a voracious reader; his reading had to be done in secret because his father would not tolerate any writing outside of the realm of the Pentateuch, the Talmud, and the Mishna. Aaron, though, indulged in worldly books, written by such (to his father) sinister figures as Dostoyevsky, Spinoza, Schopenhauer. The young man was searching for the answer to the eternal question of how one can remain a Jew and be worldly at the same time.

Both Singer and his double, Aaron, were very much involved in the intellectual Yiddish milieu of Warsaw. As a member of the writers' club, Aaron had a chance to meet with older as well as younger aspiring artists, all of whom were posing similar questions. These encounters, though primarily futile, taught Aaron one thing: he should be different, he should be above the gossip and trivialities in which his pseudointellectual colleagues indulged. They, he understood, could not become the models after whom he might fashion himself. Aaron felt that he was not tailored to write works that would advance political slogans or adhere to the principles of “socialist realism” then in vogue among writers with procommunist inclinations. Neither was the young man overanxious to cram his future books with messages that might suit the needs of the hour. This is not to say that he did not understand the dangers of Nazism and the urgency to stand up against it; he was aware of the calls of politically conscious critics to expose Hitlerism as well as their insistence on writing plays on the “need of resistance by the Jewish masses, not dramas that brought back superstition of the Middle Ages” (p. 115). Literature, according to Aaron, should be above politics; to mix the two was not his inclination, not yet. On the other hand, this son of a rabbi was not willing to conform to the views of the hedonists and escapists who argued that the only things Jews wanted to see in the books of contemporary authors were trash and sex.

Caught in the middle of this controversy, Aaron remains creatively impotent, chastising himself for wasting his time and indulging in daydreaming and sexual escapades. He often thinks of suicide. Yet despite his self-destructive urges, Aaron never abandons his desire to define to himself, as well as to others, his role as an artist. “What kind of writer was I,” he frequently asks himself. “I hadn't published a single book … I … imagined I had written a work that would startle the world. But what could startle the world? No crime, no misery, no sexual perversion, no madness. Twenty million people had perished in the Great War, and here the world was preparing for another conflagration. What could I write about that wasn't already known? A new style? Every experiment with words quickly turned into a collection of mannerisms” (p. 25). This statement not only illuminates the workings of an artist's mind; it also makes the reader understand Aaron's ahistorical view of history. On another occasion, he reinforces this view by defining the history of the world as a long chain of wars, a version of Pnin's assertion that the history of mankind is the history of pain.

Indeed, what could a writer like Aaron write about if history (and consequently suffering) repeats itself with such a morbid regularity? He was conscious of and well versed in the history of the Jews; he could not fail to see that their prospects at present were grim, to say the least. Nevertheless, his mind was set—he had to write even though it might mean the repetition of old truths and old ideas.

The people with whom Aaron surrounded himself were not helpful. Most of them were resigned to their deaths. Morris Feitelzohn, Aaron's self-appointed mentor and patron who chose the exile of Poland over the exile of America and who preached hedonism as the only escape from the burdens of the past and the futility of the present, was of no assistance to Aaron. His cynicism had no appeal to the young man who vehemently rejected the older man's advice to give the Jews what they wanted most—“sex, Torah, Revolution.” Betty, the cosmopolitan actress who crosses and recrosses the Atlantic in search of her identity, uses a double-edged sword in her relationship with Aaron, whose mistress she eventually becomes. On the one hand, she encourages him to write and shows genuine feeling for the young man; on the other hand, she distorts and destroys the play he is writing for her, which is the result of numerous sleepless nights and hard creative labor. She is unable to understand that her constant prattle about suicide as well as her insatiable sexual desires tend to stifle rather than revive the young man's artistic urges. And then there is Celia, a middle-aged woman, surrounded by riches and art objects, pampered by her immature husband, used by Feitelzohn, her idol and lover. Celia's entire time is spent either in a dimly lit, cozy living room or in the embraces of her entertainers, Aaron among them, brooding ceaselessly over death and suicide. What could she offer Aaron? Inspiration?—probably not. Her body?—it did not differ much from others that he had known. Solace?—in death, maybe.

Even more destructive to Aaron's writing career were the predictions of these characters about the future of the Jews in Poland. Betty and Celia, Feitelzohn and Haiml, Sam and Tekla are constantly warning the young writer that total annihilation of the Polish Jewry is on its way. Their predictions of the Holocaust indicate the homogeneity of thought among representatives of different strata of Polish society. Here is Morris: “‘Tsutsik, don't stay in Poland. A holocaust is coming here that will be worse than in Chmielnitsky's time. If you can get a visa—even a tourist visa—escape!’” (p. 151). (These are the words of a self-appointed priest of the hedonist temple.) Haiml, Celia's husband who preaches the doctrines of Poale Zion, according to which Jews have to forget about the thousands of years in exile and go to Palestine, also urges Aaron to leave, though he himself behaves contrary to the principles he is so wholeheartedly embracing. “‘If you have a chance to escape from here, don't wait,’” he admonishes Aaron. “‘We're caught between Hitler and Stalin. Whichever invades the country will bring a cataclysm’” (p. 64).

Aaron feels the need to justify his immobility and inertia. He witnesses Hitler's occupation of one country after another: he is bitter about the Allies assuming a “wait and see” position; he clearly perceives that all these developments leave the Jews of Poland without any hope. “But running away,” he asserts, “and leaving at bay those who were dear to me was not in my nature” (p. 120). Given his resolution, not even the businesslike exhortations of Sam Dreiman can be of any avail to him. “‘Things will not end well in Poland,’” Sam predicts. “‘That beast Hitler will soon come with his Nazis. There'll be a great war. Americans will lend a hand and they'll do what they did in the last war, but before that the Nazis will attack the Jews and there'll be nothing but grief for you here’” (pp. 155-56).

After reading these warnings, the paradox embedded in them is clear: these people clearly perceived the grief Hitler's inevitable occupation would bring, yet they didn't leave in time to prevent their own destruction.

Celia provides at least a partial answer to this paradox. She is also among those who embody ambivalent attitudes toward Aaron. On the one hand, she urges Aaron to escape and avoid committing “literary suicide,” but she herself is determined to die in Poland rather than attempt a new start as an exile in still another country: “‘I keep myself going only with the force of inertia, or call it what you will. I don't want to go to a foreign land and lie sick in some hotel room or hospital. I want to die in my own room. I don't want to rest in a strange cemetery’” (p. 244-45). Exile is what most frightens these people; they are tired of being wandering Jews. Betty, the actress constantly on the run, speaks for all of them when she says that “the sad truth is that for me there isn't one place in the world where I feel at home” (p. 132). And yet, these homeless people beg Aaron to escape. Consciously or subconsiously, all of them believe in Aaron's artistic genius. They urge him to write because by writing he will survive and atone for the sins that resulted in their exile. The frequent, and only slightly camouflaged admissions of the sinful existence they lead testify to their awareness that they are following in the path of their forefathers, committing the very idolatry that caused the expulsion of the Jews from the land of Israel. Writing is seen by them as a means to transcend alienation and estrangement from tradition. On the other hand, these people, who have resigned themselves to death, need someone to record and take account of their lives. They desire a rememberer who will through his writings make future generations more aware of the Jewish Polish milieu and of the fate they already anticipate at the hands of the Nazis. Celia and Haiml, Aaron and Dora, Morris and Betty—all of them are conscious of abandoning the true path of Judaism, committing thus the sin that brought upon them the curse of exile. Aaron is an artist, a writer, whom they choose as their intermediary between righteousness and evil, between the past and the present. They never doubt his literary genius; they believe that he will not fail to perform the holy duty with which they have entrusted him—to intercede for them and to commemorate their lives in his writings.

But Aaron does not flee, not yet. Before he escapes he must know exactly what he is leaving behind; he has to have a precise, nearly scientific knowledge of the society he abandons. Superficial knowledge of the past cannot satisfy the young man; he must get to its core, learn its nature, understand its inner workings. He has to touch it, to smell it, to see it as it is and as it was for hundreds of years. At this point in his life Shosha, the ageless, physically deformed, blonde, blue-eyed girl with a short nose and thin lips—the girl who spoke the pure Yiddish of Krochmalna Street and who, as Aaron puts it, “in her own fashion denied death” (p. 91)—begins to work miracles on the artist. None of Aaron's enlightened friends can explain why Aaron is so drawn to Shosha; later, when he decides to marry the cripple, all of them are shocked because they see his action as a denial of common sense, and a fatal obstacle to leaving Poland. Aaron is hard put to explain this step; all he can say to his stubborn interrogators is that Shosha “is a girl from my childhood. We were neighbors at No. 10 Krochmalna Street. Later I went away and for many years” (p. 136). Aaron fails to finish the sentence, and it remains the reader's task to complete it by closely following the development of the events of the novel.

Shosha, as later becomes clear, represents to the young artist the coherence and integrity of the Jewish people and their past. Even while absent from Krochmalna Street, Aaron did not forget this girl; the memories of her were deeply embedded in his mind, only to surface later and drastically change his behavior and actions. He often dreamed of Shosha, and in his dreams the two were invariably together joined by a miraculous bond.

Prior to achieving the oneness with Shosha that brings him the peace of mind necessary for his creative powers to return, Aaron has to undergo a crisis of self-doubt and resignation. But once he decides to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart, with his past, it is easier for him to shake off the destructive influences of his friends and mistresses. He abandons Dora because of her reluctance to give up her utopian communist views; Aaron cannot identify with totalitarian regimes. He is not just against communism but against all other “isms” as well. He finally finds the strength to reject Betty and Celia and to be free from the intrigues and slime into which they dragged him. Feitelzohn's theories do not appeal to him any more; he sees clearly that Morris created them solely to escape reality rather than to admit the meaninglessness of his existence. Aaron is beginning to understand that he “has thrown away four thousand years of Jewishness and exchanged it for meaningless literature, Yiddishism, Feitelzohnism” (p. 257). It also takes the sharp razor blade of an anti-Semitic Polish barber held at his throat as well as the prophetic voice of his dead father, speaking to him in the most crucial moment of his life, to rouse him from lethargy and move him to transform his life.

Leaving the barber shop, where he is mistaken for a gentile and therefore privileged to hear the most hideous anti-Semitic pronouncements, Aaron is shaking with fear, disgust, and shame. “I began to race,” he recalls, “not knowing in what direction I was going. No, I wouldn't stay in Poland! I'd leave at any price! (p. 164). Having made this decision, though not knowing yet what direction to take, Aaron now fully understands the admonitions of his father whose tradition he had denied, the admonitions earlier conveyed to him in a sudden vision of the old man accompanied by the thunderous voice of the righteous:

“Run!” a voice cried within me. “You'll sink into a slime from which you'll never be able to get out. They'll drag you into the abyss!” … “Don't shame me, your mother and your holy ancestors! All your deeds are noted in heaven.” … “Heathen! Betrayer of Israel! See what happens when you deny the Almighty! ‘You shall utterly detest it and you shall utterly abhor it, for it is a cursed thing.’”

(p. 158)

And run Aaron does, with his first stop at Bashele's apartment on Krochmalna Street, where the pure and virginal Shosha was patiently waiting for him.

Only when he is back on the street where he grew up, reunited with his past, does Aaron begin to attain some spiritual calm and tranquility. Only when he becomes one with Shosha, Singer seems to imply, do his creative powers return to him and enable him to write a novel that miraculously integrates the feuding Jewish camps, the traditional and the enlightened. Singer's intentions are clear at this point: literature and art can perform miracles where other intellectual institutions fail.⁴

Clearly Shosha inspires Aaron; she resurrects for him a past that the two once so happily shared. However, Shosha also threatens to endanger the writer's further creative existence. She provides a temporary, though necessary respite by recreating his past. It is true that awareness of the past is a required condition for Aaron's creative powers to be sustained. But to ignore and blot out the present will jeopardize his intellectual survival. He has to learn how to balance the two.

With Shosha's generous help, Aaron finally acquires the exact and so persistently sought knowledge of his past. Not only has he learned how to avoid being paralyzed by it, he has also learned how to benefit from the past's life-giving powers. Now, reunited with Shosha and having paid tribute to his past by his literary endeavors in the Polish exile, Aaron can run and fight for his survival without feelings of guilt for betraying those dear to him.

The Victorian epilogue of the novel provides additional information about its main characters. Aaron Greidinger, the now acclaimed and distinguished American Yiddish author, is brought by Singer to visit the land of Israel, where, thirteen years after leaving Poland, he meets Haiml, the only survivor of his days of youth. It is through his account to Haiml that we learn about Shosha's death as well as about Aaron's exodus from Poland. The two, together with other refugees, were nearly out of the country when Shosha suddenly fell to the ground and died. Her death had a twofold effect on Aaron: it caused him much grief, but at the same time, it made his road to freedom much easier. In the literal sense, Aaron did not succeed. But, paradoxically, he became the beneficiary of Shosha's death. He inherited from her the knowledge that otherwise would have been lost to himself and therefore to his readers. Shosha presented Aaron with a store of memories that enrich the experiences of his present life and enable him to memorialize the past of the Jewish people of Eastern Europe and their lives in his many novels and stories. His works will always be a reminder of a world that is no more.

Notes

1. I. B. Singer, “The Lecture,” in The Seance and Other Stories, p. 66. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

2. I. B. Singer, Shosha, p. 7. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

3. Edward Alexander, Isaac Bashevis Singer, p. 113.

4. The idea of an artist's omnipotence as a peacemaker in times of crises caused by exile has been explored by Singer on earlier occasions as well. The story “The Yearning Heifer” is typical in this respect. Only through the generous efforts of a Jewish writer is peace restored among the members of a troubled family, which finds itself transplanted to an isolated farm somewhere in New York State. A young writer's presence in their home makes the members of the family forget their troubles and cope with their exiled situation.