are bleak. Its roads and its earth are drenched with the blood of recently murdered people. Life appears meaningless. The inhabitants move about sluggishly. It would seem that the guardian of Israel slumbers, while her adversaries are on the alert.

The work is divided into two parts. The first deals with the struggle between good and evil as represented by the opposing factions within the community. Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, the spiritual leader of this enervated community, one of its last survivors to return, represents the forces of good within the shtetl. His is the voice of traditionalism. He was a strong leader before the events of 1648. He did not allow the study of the Kabbala, with its promise of messianic redemption and with the asceticism of its adherents. At present, he can resume certain rabbinic functions within the community, he can deal with legal matters, but he cannot handle the spiritual and social problems of the villagers. He cannot control the dissension within his family; likewise, he cannot control the growing dissension in Goray. In both situations, he retreats into his own chambers and ultimately is concerned only with his own salvation. Meanwhile, rumors of the new messiah have filtered into the secluded village, injecting into it a vitality heretofore absent, resurrecting the shtetl as only messianism can. It is, however, a destructive messianism, one that must be preceded by absolute evil, an abrogation of societal restraints, an immersion in sexual perversity and religious heresy. Part 1 ends with the rabbi’s leaving town, after being wounded in a battle with Satan, because he does not want to be buried in Goray. He fears that the evil that has overtaken Goray will contaminate even the dead.

Part 2 concerns the spiritual decline of the community through lack of leadership and perversions of the Law in the name of Shabbeteanism. The battle has been lost. Once the rabbi leaves, total chaos ensues. Part 2 begins with Rechele’s marriage to an impotent ascetic—who is also a believer in Shabbeteanism—and ends with her death, after the dybbuk (a form of satanic possession) in her body was exorcised. In the interim, the community gets a new leader, Reb Gedaliya, an emissary who proclaims the news of the crowning of the messiah. He is a ritual slaughterer by trade, a charlatan by profession. One of Singer’s many perverted religious functionaries, his lust for blood is exceeded only by his lust for Rechele, who is the innocent victim of life’s misfortunes. Gedaliya persuades the community that its redemption can take place only upon the abandonment of traditional Jewish life. Singer vividly portrays the manner in which the community loses sight of the relationship between traditional Judaism and redemption and the depths of moral turpitude into which it has plunged. Ultimately, evil—the dybbuk—is exorcised, together with the remaining Shabbeteans, and good returns to Goray. The novel ends in the spirit of a morality tale with these words: “Let none attempt to force the Lord.The Messiah will come in God’s own time.”

Satan in Goray is a bleak tale in which the forces of good and evil fight for the human soul; humankind, maimed, vulnerable, and misguided, easily succumbs to the passions of lust and perversity. Critics have seen this work as adumbrating events that were soon to take place in Europe. The strength of this early novel lies in its use of demonology and the supernatural, which became a distinctive feature of Singer’s fiction.

The Magician of Lublin

Written in 1958, serialized in 1959, and published in English in 1960, The Magician of Lublin also deals with human passions, but it is not overcast with the gloom of past events. It reflects an expansiveness often missing in Singer’s works. Its focus is not on the Jewish community itself but on the individual in a timeless context. Singer’s magician-protagonist is well cast. On a literal level, he is representative of the artist. On a symbolic level, every person may be seen as a magician, living life, like Yasha Mazur, the novel’sprotagonist, “as if walking the tightrope merely inches from disaster.” The variegated personality of the hero, “religious and heretical, good and evil, false and sincere,” and the lack of dates in the work lend themselves to a symbolic interpretation. Singer focuses on the single individual and the choices he or she makes. In Satan in Goray, historical events negate options. In The Magician of Lublin, Singer removes the encumbrances of history and allows his hero to make conscious decisions that determine the progress of his life.

Yasha Mazur is a complex person, vital, exuberant, intense—above all, a man with a personal destiny. Unlike Jacob, the protagonist of The Slave, for example, who is a good person, motivated to do right no matter what the circumstances are, Yasha has an intricate personality. It engages him constantly in a struggle of opposing forces. In Satan in Goray, the opposing forces are presented as two distinct elements within the community. The triumph of one necessitates the removal of the other. When evil was victorious, Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi had to leave Goray. In The Magician of Lublin, however, these forces exist within the individual, enduring aspects of human nature. Yasha Mazur’s entire life is a battle. He can never conquer the evil drive. He can only negotiate with it, appease it, or in some other way deal with it, so that it remains dormant. He never knows, however, when it will awaken to begin another round.

Yasha Mazur was reared in a pious Jewish home, studied the Talmud until his father died—his mother died when he was seven—and then joined the circus. He maintains a home in Lublin with his wife, Esther, but roams the Polish countryside as a “circus performer and hypnotist.” As an artist or magician, he moves in various worlds, assumes various guises or personalities, and has a different mistress in each world. He aspires to higher things: He is a successful artist and would like to perform in Warsaw, in the summer theater of the prestigious Saxony Gardens. He is barred from doing so because he is Jewish. The closest he comes to achieving this goal is at the apartment of the middle-class Gentile Emilia, located on a street opposite the Saxony Gardens. Yasha’s relationship with Emilia focuses the tensions of the work. He thinks he is in love with her, but she refuses the role of mistress. She wants to be his wife. To marry her, Yasha would have to divorce Esther, convert to Christianity, and procure great wealth to maintain the facade he has established in his courting of Emilia. These are formidable decisions that will determine his future.

Singer establishes the dichotomy of predestination and free will early in the work in the contrasting attitudes toward life represented by Yasha and his wife. Esther is a religious woman, married twenty years to Yasha; they have no children. Her entire life consists of making a home for a husband who returns to it only on holidays. She loves him but regrets, at times, not having married someone more stable. The thought of changing her life, however, never crosses her mind. She is a strong believer in Providence and accepts her fate as a lonely woman.

Yasha, although he says that “everything is fate,” realizes that he shapes his own destiny in all his choices. He is a magician who consorts with thieves, but he refuses to use his powers for evil purposes. He will not become a thief. When he finally attempts it, out of a desperate need to support Emilia, he fails and injures himself. The man who is so agile that he can walk a tightrope to the awe of his audience becomes a shlemiel and bungles a simple act of burglary. Although he is Jewish by birth, he is a nonbeliever—or says he is—by choice. He does not pray, because God does not answer the prayers of his supplicants: his “gifts” are “plagues, famines, poverty, and pogroms.” Nevertheless, to become a Christian for Emilia is a difficult choice for him. He is a libertine, yet he considers the institution of marriage sacred and cannot easily make the decision to break up his home for his new infatuation. He is faced with the dilemma of choosing “between his religion and the cross, between Esther and Emilia, between honesty and crime.” These choices will “seal his destiny.” He finally chooses to remain with his own religion and decides also that traditionalism is more meaningful than assimilationism.

Yasha is aware that life is the most powerful seductress. He returns to his home and builds for himself a doorless brick prison, which frees him from temptation and allows him to meditate on his past actions, yet he discovers that as long as he is alive, he cannot shut out the world. As an artist or a magician, he went out into the world, succumbing to carnal pleasures, drinking, eating, loving unrestrainedly. Having come to the realization that “there must be discipline,” he undergoes the transformation from sinner to saint. As an ascetic, in the confines of his self-imposed banishment, considered by all a “holy man,” the world comes to him. Even his past love writes him a letter. Yasha’s imprisonment has been only partially successful. He has turned his intense feelings in another direction, moving from the sensual to the spiritual. In this work, Singer suggests that people cannot escape their essence: They and their passions are one. The Magician of Lublin presents a positive outlook even though it concludes (as does Singer’s novel Shosha) in a dark cell or room.

Enemies

Singer’s novels Enemies and Shosha directly address the most tragic time of Jewish history, the Holocaust. Enemies, ironically subtitled A Love Story, is Singer’s only novel set in the United States; it deals specifically with survivors of the Holocaust. In Shosha, Singer returns for another nostalgic look at the destroyed world in which he grew up and attempts to capture the spirit of his people as the perimeters of death close in on them.

Like The Magician of Lublin, Enemies is written on two levels. It fills a gap in Singer’scanon. Until this work, Singer’s literary aim was to re-create the destroyed world of eastern European Jewry, to present the pulsating life that existed specifically in his native Poland. Enemies acknowledges the destruction of his fictive world and deals with problems confronting those who survived. In a note that precedes the work, Singer asserts that although he has lived with survivors for years, this work is in no way typical of the Holocaust experience. The novel presents the “exceptional case,” he says, unique to an individual who is a victim both of his own personality and of his persecutors. Certainly, this can be said of all victims, and the novel, despite his abjuration, is a moving depiction of the varied problems many survivors have encountered. Singer’s note cautions the reader against a rigorous historical interpretation. The Holocaust serves as a framework within which Singer presents his perennial concern: humankind battling its adversaries in the dark of night, in the fashion of Jacob and the angel. In the biblical narrative, Jacob is not overcome; he walks away, at daybreak, limping but unvanquished. Singer’s hero also walks away, but not as a victor.

Enemies bears a similarity to Satan in Goray both in its focus on an individual who lives a tormented life, burdened with the knowledge of the tragic destruction of all that is meaningful to him, and in its use of the supernatural. In this work, the spiritual powers that represent the forces of good and evil also reflect a movement away from traditionalism. In addition, they indicate the extent to which the characters, through their previous experiences, have lost touch with reality. Enemies also has affinities with The Magician of Lublin: The multiple personalities of the protagonist are reflected in his relationships with three strikingly different women.

Enemies is a ghostly story. Herman Broder, the protagonist, is defined through his actions in the Holocaust. He spent those years hiding in a hayloft and has acquired a negative identity in the Holocaust’s aftermath. Now, as a survivor, he is psychologically warped and socially maimed. He lacks the courage to commit suicide, hides behind schizophrenia to “deaden” his consciousness, and assumes the guise of a demon. In New York, Broder becomes a ghostwriter for a rabbi. He shuns contact with others to preserve his anonymity and lives a life of haunting duplicity with his second wife and his mistress. The tensions in his spiritual juggling act are intensified by the appearance of his wife from the Old World—he had assumed her to be dead. Ultimately, he disappears, vanishing like a ghost.

The work is divided into three parts. Part 1 establishes the diverse personalities of Herman Broder, “a fraud, a transgressor—a hypocrite,” as he sees himself, and the complications they create. Broder’s current life in New York is eclipsed by the terrifying experiences of his past. He lives in Brooklyn with his second wife, Yadwiga, the Polish woman who worked for his family before the war and who hid him in a hayloft during the Nazi occupation. He married her in gratitude for saving his life, but his relationship with her is deceitful. She does not know about his professional life or about his mentally disturbed mistress, Masha, who shares with him her experience of the Holocaust. He spends as much time with Masha as he does with Yadwiga, always telling Yadwiga that, as a book salesman, he must go out of town to sell books.

The tangled web of Broder’s relationships is further complicated when his first wife, Tamara, who has survived being shot twice—one bullet still lodged within her—comes to New York and seeks him out. Part 1 ends with an additional complication when Masha claims to be pregnant and Broder promises to marry her.

Part 2 attempts a resolution of the problems. Through Broder’s conversations with Masha and Tamara, much of the Holocaust experience is re-created. Like Elie Wiesel and other writers of the Holocaust, Singer points out that the full enormity of the Holocaust can never be expressed, because words are inadequate to the task. That which is related, however, is extremely powerful. Singer deals with the theological, social, and philosophical problems, both individual and universal, that confront humankind in coming to terms with the Holocaust. While presenting the myriad issues with which survivors have been faced—equivocal attitudes toward faith, a missing spouse who turns up after the other has remarried, disorientation in a new environment, reestablishing an identity that was nonexistent for a time, relating to people as human beings within a society rather than as individuals competing for survival—Singer indicates that the individual is also his or her own victim, governed by passions he or she cannot or will not control. Broder would not have married Yadwiga if he had thought that Tamara were alive. Now, however, he wants to hold on to all three women. They satisfy different needs: Yadwiga cares for him and worships him with a childlike simplicity; Masha fulfills his sexual desires and fires his imagination with her nightlong storytelling; Tamara is his wife, to whom he feels committed.

When the intricacies of his life seem overwhelming, he resorts to traditionalism as a life-sustaining measure, yet he cannot maintain his resolve to be a good Jew. He is a weak person by nature, and the impact of the Holocaust has left him without a will, without the power to make meaningful choices and decisions. He is, as he tells Tamara, a “corpse.” His only alternative is to vanish. Herman Broder joins Singer’s other eternal wanderers, the most famous of whom is Gimpel the Fool. The epilogue, in an almost Darwinian statement, attests the insignificance of the individual in the larger scheme of things by confirming Herman Broder’s disappearance and suggesting that life nevertheless continues for those who can battle their enemies successfully.

Shosha

Shosha is narrated in the first person, unusual in Singer’s novels that have been translated into English. Originally appearing in the Forward under the title Neshome Ekspeditsyes (soul expeditions) in 1974, it is considered a fictionalized and expanded version of the memoir A Young Man in Search of Love, which appeared almost simultaneously in 1978. A beautifully wrought work, it is one of the most poignant of all of Singer’s novels. Set in Poland in the 1930’s, the novel portrays the plight of the Jewish community, overcast with the gloom of the Nazi invasion, yet it brims with the lives, loves, and hopes of its characters. It combines realism with humor and pathos. It is another nostalgic glance at a decimated world, but it is not a gloomy work. It is, as the Yiddish title indicates, the journey of the author’s soul, in an affectionate tribute to the vitality of the shtetl, and stands in defiance of his statement at the end of the work: “Time is a book whose pages you can turn forward, not back.” Shosha presents a marvelous picture of Warsaw before the war, focusing on its Yiddish cultural and intellectual life, its writers, artists, philosophers, actors, critics, and dilettantes, as well as its simple people. Within this historical framework, Singer presents his protagonist’s life in Poland at the time of greatest stress, a time when Jewish life and culture were disintegrating.

In Shosha, the conflict between good and evil that animates all of Singer’s works takes the form of the relationship between victim and persecutor. All of the characters are concerned with their immediate gratification. They arouse the reader’s sympathy because they become victims of their own blindness and naïveté. In their determination to live normally, they love, argue, philosophize, celebrate holidays. They write plays about dybbuks and talk about dybbuks within themselves. They do not recognize the external evil, the phantom that surrounds them or pursues them.

The first part of the novel charts the circular movement of the protagonist as he attempts to reestablish a sense of belonging, transporting the reader to the halcyon days of the narrator’s childhood and moving forward to the period preceding the destruction of the shtetl by Hitler. The ancestors of the protagonist, Aaron Greidinger, have lived in Poland for seven hundred years. Krochmalna Street, already familiar to Singer’s public through his memoir In My Father’s Court, is not only a place housing his father’s judiciary but also the scene of the narrator’s first love, for Shosha—his neighbor, his playmate, his first audience—who believes and trusts him implicitly and unconditionally.

The work delineates the maturation of the narrator, as the serenity of his youthful universe is quickly replaced by the turmoil of world events with their disquieting effect upon the Jews of Poland. The first twenty years of his life pass rapidly as he moves from Krochmalna Street and attempts to define himself as a writer. In Warsaw, the Writers’ Club becomes the focal point for the intellectuals, much as the synagogue was the focal point of the traditional Jewish community. It is through the people whom he meets at the Writers’ Club that Aaron Greidinger works out his role as writer and lover.

Greidinger’s destiny and identity are intimately bound to his youth on Krochmalna Street, and after twenty years, he returns to the area and visits Shosha and her mother. He is amazed that Shosha has changed only slightly during the years: She and Greidinger are the same age, but she looks like a child. Greidinger falls in love with her immediately. He explains to Betty Slonim, the Yiddish actor from America for whom he is writing a play, that he sees himself in Shosha. Shosha represents the naïveté and gentleness of his childhood, a phase of his life that he wants to recapture and repossess. She is Krochmalna Street. She is the shtetl. She is the traditionalism that refuses to keep in step with modernity but is beautiful nevertheless. She also represents the sources of his creativity, the childlike wonder that Singer the writer still possesses in old age. Part 1 ends with Greidinger’s movement back in time, his failure as a playwright, his proposal to Shosha, and his spending most of his time in the small apartment on Krochmalna Street as the political situation worsens for the Jews in Poland.

Part 2 develops the protagonist’s affirmation of his unity with his people. It is Yom Kippur, a day of judgment and reckoning for all Jews. The war is getting closer, Poles are more outspoken in their anti-Semitism, and Greidinger spends the day with Shosha, fasting. He marries Shosha two months later during the festival of Hanukkah. By doing so, he forgoes the opportunity to leave Warsaw before the Germans enter. He will not forsake Shosha, knowing that she could not survive by herself during these times. His writing career has improved; he is writing novels that have been accepted by his publisher. Part 2 concludes with the war imminent but with everyone presenting reasons for not leaving Warsaw prior to the German invasion. The epilogue ties the loose ends together. It takes place thirteen years later, during Greidinger’s trip to Israel, where he meets his Warsaw friend, Haiml. While seated in the dark, each tells the story of what happened to his family, his friends, and how he escaped. Shosha died, as expected, because in her fragility she could not keep ahead of the march of malevolence pursuing her and overtaking Europe.

The King of the Fields

Singer’s last novel to be published before his death in 1991 was The King of the Fields, set in prehistoric Poland, a violent, animalistic place where tribes of cave-dwelling hunters struggle against Poles who cultivate the land. Singer seems to have dipped into a nightmare world so embedded in the past as to be unrelated to the present, yet the hellish qualities of this Stone Age Poland and the brutality of its inhabitants conjure up the Poland of the Holocaust—a wilderness of corruption, a wasteland for humanity.

Scum

Scum, written in the late 1960’s and published in English the year of Singer’s death, re-creates pre-Holocaust Warsaw at the beginning of the twentieth century. Max Barabander, a thief turned businessman, returns to Singer’s famous Krochmalna Street after decades in Argentina. His son has died, and his grieving wife ignores him; he has become impotent. His journey backward to Krochmalna Street is his attempt to journey toward renewed health, or at least toward a new life.

Barabander becomes involved both with Shmuel Smetena, the central figure in Krochmalna Street mobster activities, and with a saintly rabbi whose daughter, Tsirele, he wants to marry. He poses as a grieving widower to win Tsirele while working with Shmuel Smetena’s mistress on a scheme to seduce unsuspecting young women and ship them off to an Argentinian brothel. The project has a restorative effect on Max’s virility, but when the web of lies he must weave begins to unravel, he is exposed as bereft of moral character, one for whom life—his or another’s—is devoid of meaning. His only dreams are of “shady deals.” Scum is Singer’s version of the underworld; the literal underworld of gangsters mirrors the underworld of demons and dybbuks that make no appearance in this novel. When human beings are such scum, there seems to be no need for the Evil One.

The Certificate

The Certificate, serialized in the Forward in 1967, was published posthumously in 1992. Its protagonist, David Bendinger, an eighteen-year-old would-be writer, arrives in Warsaw in 1922 with an unfinished novel, an essay on Spinoza and the Kabbala, and a collection of prose poems. Like so many of Singer’s males, David soon finds himself involved with three women: Sonya, his old girlfriend; Minna, a woman whom he agrees to marry in order to obtain immigration papers for Palestine; and Edusha, his Marxist landlady. Like the youthful Singer, whom he resembles, David turns every event, no matter how seemingly insignificant, into an occasion for philosophical musing. Unlike Max Barabander of Scum, David Bendinger dreams of more than shady deals, and he believes that those around him have worth. No matter how complicated his life becomes, he dreams of writing and he thinks of God.

Meshugah

Meshugah, which means crazy, was first called Lost Souls, a title that connects this novel with Shosha, which was first called Neshome Ekspeditsyes (soul expeditions). Serialized in the Forward in the early 1980’s and appearing in English in 1994, the novel brings Aaron Greidinger, the protagonist of Shosha, into a post-Holocaust 1950’s setting. This most Singer-like character is a Polish exile who serializes novels in Yiddish for the Forward. While Aaron has his series of women, his primary mate, Miriam Zalkind, who is writing her dissertation on his work, juggles her own set of men. All are “lost souls” harboring memories of the Holocaust, mourning loved ones, contemplating suicide. Aaron discovers that the real truth of human suffering defies the power of writing—the world is meshugah.

Shadows on the Hudson

Shadows on the Hudson was originally serialized in Yiddish twice a week in the Forward between January, 1957, and January, 1958. Singer had long wanted this novel to be published in English, but the project was undertaken only years after his death. It is set in the 1940’s in Manhattan, and the lives of its characters are, like those in Meshugah, overshadowed by the Holocaust. As bleak as Scum but without its sordid underworld, Shadows on the Hudson deals with characters who strive for some sense and meaning in a world that continuously trips them up. Hertz Dovid Grein rotates among wife, mistress, and lover, always yearning for the one who is not there. His lover, Anna, juggles him along with her first and second husbands. His mistress, Esther, marries another, divorces, flees with Grein, and, in turn, flees him.

In the second part of this three-part novel, these chaotic couplings seem to be headed for resolution in a return to the past and traditional values. Grein returns home to his wife and to orthodoxy, Anna returns to her first husband, Esther marries, and even Anna’s long-widowed father marries and has a son. The hope that a retreat from the secular will result in a return to meaning is demolished in part 3, however, when the new couplings are undone and the newborn child is recognized as severely retarded. The shadows of the Holocaust stretch over the Hudson and into the future. What saves this novel, and much of Singer’s fiction, from a darkness too intense to bear is his extraordinary ability to create comic situations from the bleakest of moments. Whether caricaturing secondary characters or rendering outlandish a protagonist’s rationalization of his or her latest sexual exploit, Singer’s comic touch lightens his vision. Except in a few novels such as Scum and The King of the Fields, there is a redemptive quality in the very need his characters display for meaning and for love.

Singer occupies a unique place in the literary world. His works transcend the barriers of age, education, and culture, and they appeal to all peoples. Singer was a chronicler, historian, spiritualist, and moralist, and his writings are informed by a deep compassion for men and women who are, after all, only human. Singer may admit to a pessimistic view of humankind, but it is a sympathetic rather than a cynical pessimism. Throughout the darkness of his presentation, there flickers a spark of faith in the basic goodness of humankind, the promise of a universal and eternal light.