kind of confusion may be explained by Singer’s ability to hold a number of opposing convictions at any given time. Therefore, his readers find it almost impossible to persuade themselves that Singer is in sympathy with whatever position they hold. Those who have embraced the modern world are troubled by Singer’s disgust with it and by his advocacy of traditional restraints, as well as by his mysticism; on the other hand, those who advocate a return to orthodoxy are shocked by his attitude toward sex, which Singer seems to consider a joyful, rather than an evil, experience, and by the impish humor that tends to overcome him at the most serious moments.

As Sarah Blacher Cohen pointed out, the play Yentl, which was developed from one of Singer’s short stories, illustrates his habit of showing both sides of an issue at the same time in order to point out that whatever choice a human being makes will have disadvantages and may even lead to disaster. Yentl is a young girl in a nineteenth century Polish village who wishes to know as much as she can about her faith. Unfortunately, she lives in a society that bars women from theological studies. Therefore, because of her devotion to her God, Yentl commits a sin: She rejects her own female identity, disguises herself as a man, and enters a yeshiva. Then, when she falls in love with another student, Avigdor, she cannot admit her femininity. In fact, she actually marries a woman, thus committing another sin. At the end of the play, Yentl has lost Avigdor to her own unlawful wife, and she must leave the community, probably once again to study in the disguise of a man, thus sinfully rejecting her own sex forever.

Singer is obviously sympathetic to Yentl’s problems, which, after all, arise from her desire to serve God, rather than from any intent to defy Him. On the other hand, Singer does not justify Yentl’s action. As a traditionalist, he clearly feels that, by denying her womanly desire to marry and have children, as well as by engaging in deliberate deceit, Yentl has made a wrong choice. Perhaps, as Cohen suggests, it is God who must be indicted for somehow making a mistake, putting a man’s soul into a woman’s body. To question God’s decisions, as Singer frequently does in his works, is as traditional as the Torah itself. Yet though he himself broke from his orthodox background, Singer expresses his uneasiness about abandoning the old customs by emphasizing the sense of alienation felt by all individuals in his fiction who similarly abandon their ancient customs. Even though he cannot go back in time, as Shapiro is attempting to do, it is clear that Singer identifies Shapiro’s problem as his own and as the problem of every Jew in the modern world.

The Slave

First published: Der Knekht, 1961 (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Novel

Although love causes a Jewish man to reject the laws of his people, that love also brings him to even more profound devotion.

On the most superficial level, The Slave is simply a historical novel, set in the seventeenth century, about a Jewish man, Jacob of Josefov, who, at a time when many Jews were being massacred, was fortunate enough simply to have been captured by robbers and sold to a farmer, Jan Bzik, in a remote area of Poland. There are, however, many kinds of slavery described in the book. If at first Jacob is enslaved by the Poles, later he is the slave of lust and then a slave of the prejudice both of the Christians and of his Jewish brothers.

The Slave is also the story of alienation. Because he is a faithful Jew, Jacob is an alien among the Christians; however, because of his forbidden love for a non-Jewish woman and his deepening religious awareness, he is also an alien among his own people. Singer’s choice of his protagonist’s name underlines the importance of the theme of alienation. After the biblical Jacob’s lost son, Joseph, rose from the depths of slavery to become the pharaoh’s adviser, it was Jacob who moved his family to alien Egypt.

The Slave is divided into three parts. In the first part, Jacob is desperately trying to keep his religious laws among debased and violent peasants who, though they think of themselves as Christians, are actually primitive pagans, governed by no moral law. When Jacob attempts to keep himself physically clean, when in obedience to his dietary laws he refuses to eat their nonkosher meat, and, above all, when he avoids taking part in their drunken debauches and sexual orgies—in other words, when he emphasizes his otherness—most of the peasants become distrustful and angry. Only the protection of Jan Bzik and the sympathy of his daughter, Wanda Bzik, keep Jacob from being killed. Yet even Wanda, who aids Jacob in his religious observances, cannot understand why, although he will sleep with her, he refuses to marry her. She is so deeply in love with Jacob that she offers to take his faith, even though by doing so she would risk her death, as well as his. Then emissaries from a Jewish community arrive with ransom money, and Jacob leaves.

After he has settled in the village of Pilitz, Jacob finds that he cannot get along without Wanda. His feeling for her is more than lust; it is love. Therefore, despite the danger, Jacob risks his life to bring her out of the mountains. Wanda has no problem about becoming Jewish. Neither the Christians in the area nor the Jews of Pilitz, however, must know that Wanda was a Polish Christian. Therefore, Jacob and Sarah, as she is now named, decide that she will pretend to be a mute, because by speaking she could easily expose her own background. For a time, their deception is successful. She is accepted as “dumb Sarah.” When Sarah goes into labor, however, she calls out in Polish, thus betraying the fact that she is not Jewish. Shocked, as well as fearful of Christian retribution, the village immediately treats her as an outcast, refusing to feed her or to help her in any way. After she dies in childbirth, Jacob flees with the newborn baby, whom he has named Benjamin, after the youngest son of the biblical Jacob, whose mother also died at his birth.

In the final section of the novel, which takes place twenty years later, Jacob returns to Pilitz, planning to find Sarah’s body and to take it back with him for final burial in Israel, where Jacob now lives and where Benjamin is a lecturer in a yeshiva. Over the years, Jacob has grown spiritually, inspired by the example of Sarah, who was more devoutly Jewish than the people who scorned her. Jacob, however, is not able to take her to Israel. In Pilitz, he becomes ill and dies. While he is being buried in the Jewish cemetery, the grave diggers find Sarah’s body, which had supposedly been buried outside holy ground. They realize that when the cemetery was expanded, her burial place had been included, perhaps accidentally, but more likely as an indication of the judgment of Providence. Husband and wife are buried together, accepted and honored at last.

Enemies: A Love Story

First published: Sonim, de Geshichte fun a Liebe, 1966, in Jewish Daily Forward (English translation, 1972)

Type of work: Novel

Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who have made their way to New York City find that they cannot escape the past.

With Enemies: A Love Story, Singer entered a new phase in his literary career. This was the first of his novels to use the United States as its setting and also the first in which almost all of the characters were Holocaust survivors. Of all his novels, Enemies is probably the most complex, at least where tone is concerned. On one hand, his survivors are so haunted by their memories of the death camps, so tormented by guilt because they survived, and so tortured by their loss of faith, that they seem more dead than alive. This is the stuff of tragedy.

At the same time, Enemies has all the elements of a classical farce. The characters engage in self-dramatization and verbal exaggeration. They shout and throw things. Moreover, the central character, Herman Broder, is a trickster like the scheming servants in the witty plays of the English Restoration period. Because Broder has very little control over his life, he achieves his goals through trickery. He invents elaborate falsehoods in order to conceal his actions from his employer, his girl friend, his mistress, and his wife, even from casual acquaintances. As his affairs become more and more tangled and his lies more and more complex, the pace of the novel becomes increasingly hectic until the inevitable happens: Broder’s victims meet, compare notes, confront him, and combine against him.

The most accurate classification of Enemies would be as a tragicomedy. Though he does contribute to his own downfall, Broder lacks the stature of a tragic hero. However, he is a man to be pitied. He still has nightmares about the Holocaust, which deprived him of his entire family, including his wife and his children. He is not an ingrate; he has not forgotten that he was saved by the family’s Polish maid Yadwiga, who hid him in a hayloft. After liberation, Broder married her in a civil ceremony and brought her to the United States, where she keeps his apartment immaculate, cooks his favorite foods, and displays her love for him in every way she can. Broder supports the household by ghostwriting speeches and articles for a nearby rabbi, who is too busy making profitable public appearances to do his own work. Broder, too, is living a lie: He pretends to Yadwiga that he is a book salesman, who is expected to make frequent business trips; in fact, when he is supposed to be in Philadelphia, he is in bed with his tempestuous mistress Masha, another Holocaust survivor. Having obtained a divorce from her husband, Masha wants Broder to abandon Yadwiga and marry her. However, her hopes are dashed by the reappearance of Broder’s supposedly dead wife, Tamara. Broder now has three women to deal with, two of whom insist that they are pregnant. The novel ends with two deaths, a birth, and the disappearance of the man who found that lovers could indeed end up as enemies.

Shosha

First published: Neshome Ekspeditsyes, 1974 (English translation, 1978)

Type of work: Novel

In Warsaw, during the period of Hitler’s rise, a young Jewish writer searches for love and meaning.

Shosha is a realistic novel that is undisguisedly based on Singer’s own life. The protagonist, Aaron Greidinger, is the son of a rabbi. Aaron’s younger brother is named Moishe. The family even lives first at the actual address of the Singer family in Warsaw, number 10 Krochmalna Street, then later in rural Galicia. Like Singer, Aaron is an aspiring writer. He moves to Warsaw, becomes a proofreader and translator, and becomes involved with a Communist girl. In the 1930’s, like all the other Jews in Poland, he is living from day to day, waiting for Adolf Hitler’s invasion and probably for death.

There are, however, important differences between Singer’s life and that of Aaron. Perhaps the most crucial difference is that, in the novel there is no older brother to guide Aaron, to help him in his career, and eventually to make it possible for him to escape to America. In contrast, Aaron must rely on friends and lovers for affection, for companionship, and for encouragement. Shosha is really the story of how Aaron’s life and thought were influenced by his relationships with five women and one man.

The man is Dr. Morris Feitelzohn, a philosopher without a university, a nonstop talker with encyclopedic knowledge, and a noted lover of women, whom Aaron meets at the center of bohemian life in Warsaw, the Writers’ Club. Aaron’s discussions with Dr. Feitelzohn, who has an opinion on every subject, force the young man to think deeply. Furthermore, although Dr. Feitelzohn has no money and even borrows from the impecunious Aaron, he knows everyone. Several of his friends have an important influence on Aaron’s future.

One of these friends is Celia Chentshiner, the wife of a wealthy man who encourages her extramarital affairs as long as she continues to mother him. Aaron soon discovers that Celia’s only real interests in life are erotic. Even her passion for literature and the arts is based on the fact that cultural conversations with gifted men such as Dr. Feitelzohn and Aaron stimulate her sexually. Celia’s affairs with them and with others, however, are in actuality an attempt to conquer boredom. Like many of Singer’s characters, she is alienated from her traditions and unable to find anything to replace them.

Another of Dr. Feitelzohn’s friends is Sam Dreiman, a wealthy American, whose mistress, Betty Slonim, is an actress. Unlike Celia, Betty is interested in men primarily so that she can advance her career in the theater. Encouraged by Betty, Sam becomes interested in a story that Aaron intends to write and pays him to write it as a play, with Betty in the starring role. The advance solves Aaron’s financial problems; however, the play is no good, partly because Aaron has had to change it radically in order to please Betty, and partly because he has spent so much time with women, including Betty, that he has not really done it justice.

Another of the women who is important in Aaron’s life is Dora Stolnitz, a fanatical Communist. Even though his mind tells him that he could well be imprisoned if the police raid her apartment, he cannot prevent himself from spending the night with her. Unfortunately, there is no place in her life for Aaron, who is an anti-Communist.

Tekla, the kind and cheerful Polish maid in Aaron’s apartment house, is important primarily because of what she represents to Aaron. Unlike Celia, Betty, and Dora, all of whom make demands on life, Tekla wishes only to give of herself. It is people such as Tekla, Aaron decides, who enable one to believe in the goodness of God.

The woman with whom Aaron falls in love is in many ways like Tekla. Shosha lives on Krochmalna Street, where she and Aaron were childhood playmates. She is neither intelligent nor well educated, but she is totally devoted to Aaron. When, to the horror of his friends at the Writers’ Club, Aaron marries Shosha, he is perhaps attempting to return to his childhood and to a world without ambivalence, governed by common beliefs and by unalterable rules.

Thirteen years later, some time after the end of World War II, Celia’s husband and Aaron meet in Israel and compare notes about their friends and relatives, most of whom, including Shosha, were either murdered or died of hardship. As the book ends, the two men are still unable to find an answer for the question that Dr. Feitelzohn posed so many years ago: Why, if there is a good God, does He permit such suffering?

“Gimpel the Fool”

First published: “Gimpl Tam,” 1945 (collected in Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories, 2006)

Type of work: Short story

A good man, who is deceived and mocked by everyone around him, discovers that he is not the fool that they think he is.

Like many of Singer’s stories, “Gimpel the Fool” takes place in a shtetl, or Jewish village, in Poland, at an unspecified time before the Russian Revolution. Although it is full of details reflecting life in such a village, the story has the universal quality of a moralistic folktale, including the appearance of an evil spirit and a visitor from beyond the grave.

From the beginning of the story, it is indicated that someone called a fool in this world may not really be a fool by other standards. After he introduces himself as “Gimpel the Fool,” the narrator and protagonist proceeds to disagree with the appellation that he has been given throughout his life. He is not really a fool, he says, but simply a man who does not suspect others and, when he finds that he has been deceived, does not like to attack them. In other words, he is trusting and forgiving. Such qualities, Singer’s story suggests, should be valued, not mocked.

In the first section of the story, Gimpel describes all the tricks that were played on him during his youth, when, after he was orphaned, he became a baker’s apprentice. No matter what impossible event that he was told had occurred, he would run outside to see. Because he could be deceived so easily, everyone called him a fool. As the rabbi whom Gimpel consulted told him, however, the real danger in this world is not being a fool, but being evil. Gimpel is not evil.

When the community decides to get Gimpel married, he is certainly not deceived about the character of the bride whom they have chosen for him. Elka is dirty, shrewish, and promiscuous. With the whole village so determined on the match, however, Gimpel consents, assuring himself that once they are married, Elka will respect his authority. Unfortunately, she does not. Even on the wedding night, his wife refuses to sleep with him. Then, when Elka has a son four months after the wedding, Gimpel discovers the reason why the village was so intent on the marriage.

During the next twenty years, Gimpel continues to forgive Elka for her infidelities, to treat her kindly, and to love her offspring. Then, when she is dying, Elka asks her husband’s forgiveness and reveals that none of their six children is his.

It is this shock that enables the Evil Spirit to tempt Gimpel, to urge him to deceive others as they have always deceived him. For the first time in his life, Gimpel does an evil deed. He urinates into his bread dough. Before he can distribute the bread, however, Elka comes to him in a dream and tells him that he is a fool for doing wrong, that he will pay for it in the next world, as she is paying for her evil deeds. Gimpel buries the bread, distributes his money among the children, and becomes a wanderer and a teller of stories. Now he has a new attitude toward lies. In his perspective, all things are possible, and therefore true; it is only the time and place that may be inaccurate. A happy man, Gimpel looks forward to his reunion with his wife, who now comes to him lovingly in dreams, and to life after death in a place where there is no deception.

“Alone”

First published: “Aleyn,” 1962 (collected in Collected Stories: “Gimpel the Fool” to “The Letter Writer,” 2004)

Type of work: Short story

In a corrupt modern world, a man resists seduction by a demon.

After he moved to the United States, Singer wrote a number of stories such as “Alone,” which reflect his conviction that the modern world is corrupt and doomed. Some of these stories are set in New York, others in Miami. “Alone” is particularly interesting because, although the setting is Miami Beach, instead of a Polish village, the pattern of the story is very much like that of the folkloric tales. There is a protagonist with a lesson to learn, an unwise wish that comes true, and an attack from a demon, which tests the hero’s virtue.

“Alone” is told in the first person. The narrator is a Jewish man who is spending the summer in Miami Beach, instead of in New York with his wife, because he suffers from hay fever. Tired of the noisy fellow guests in his hotel, he utters his wish: that he could be all alone in a hotel. The narrator’s wish comes true. Bankrupt, the hotel where he is staying is closed. The guests he dislikes depart, and he moves to a room in a cheap hotel not far away, where, as he wished, he is the only guest. No one is in this hotel but the hunchbacked Cuban girl at the desk and himself.

Already tired of being alone, the narrator takes a bus to the end of the line and back, musing on the landscape that he is passing, a physical and moral desert, which humankind has disguised in order to indulge its vices, including greed, promiscuity, and cruelty. Later that evening, a hurricane hits, and as it is reaching its height, the Cuban girl asks to be admitted to his room, explaining that she is afraid. Although to him she looks like an animal or a witch, the narrator permits her to stay. Later, begging him to see that she is not a beast but a woman, the girl tells him about her life of abuse, neglect, and poverty. When she concludes by offering herself to him, however, the narrator rejects her, explaining that he must be faithful to his wife, as God mandates. Infuriated, she spits on him and leaves. The next day, the Cuban girl triumphantly tells the narrator that he must leave because the hotel is being closed.

Although to the protagonist the importance of the episode is his successful resistance to the sin of lust, Singer suggests that in fact he is guilty of another sin, that of pride. His initial wish to be alone is evidence of that sin; the narrator does not seem to think of any of his fellow guests as human beings, but only as impediments to his own desires. Even though he repents of his wish, once again he separates himself from humanity by feeling only revulsion toward the girl at the desk. Because she is from Cuba, a place that he associates with witchcraft—in other words, because she is different from him—he assumes that the Cuban girl is a demon. Even when she tells him her sad story, he shows no pity for her, and at the end of the story, he is still focusing only on what he considers to be her witch’s attempt to seduce him. Ironically, as Singer suggests, while one is resisting one kind of sin, the forces of evil may be playing their ultimate trick by sending another to take possession of the soul.