Isaac Bashevis Singer

Start Free Trial

Mistakes Made and Mended

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following review of The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, Cheyette concludes that Singer's stories continue to hold universal appeal while treating subjects specific to Jewish culture and history.
SOURCE: Cheyette, Bryan. “Mistakes Made and Mended.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4464 (21 October 1988): 1180.

Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel The Penitent (1984) was an uncharacteristic tirade against modernity. Since its publication in Yiddish in 1974, Singer has been assiduously rewriting his act of betrayal as a young man in Warsaw in the 1920s, a betrayal which culminated in his departure from the devout Yeshiva world of his Polish-Jewish parents—subsequently destroyed in the Holocaust—for the sacrilegious world of his incorrigible imagination which, since the 1930s, has found a congenial home in America. The Penitent, as its title suggests, is about a modern-day figure who returns to the rabbinical values of Singer's parents. In an epilogue to this work, Singer has pointedly distanced himself from his novel's central character, but he is also on record as describing his last novel as “his favorite among all his books”.

The Death of Methuselah, Singer's tenth collection of fables and short stories, continues this game of redressing past guilt by beginning with an author's note which promotes a view of “art” not as “rebellion and spite” but as having “the potential of building and correction”. His introduction emphasizes, in particular, the links between artistic creation and the biblical act of Genesis, a common theme in much of his critical writing. Just as a writer throws his unsuccessful stories into the wastepaper bin, Singer's God destroys man, his corrupted masterpiece, in the Flood. The title story is ironically intended to “mend the mistakes of the eternal builder” and imagines a nine-hundred-year-old Methuselah—who is unsurprisingly, “not what [he] used to be”—finally succumbing to the world of sin. Enveloped by the anti-life, the “oldest of sinners” makes love with Naamah the she-devil. While this Faustian pact is being consummated, Methuselah's grandson, Noah, is preparing for the destruction of mankind and thus confirms the cabbalistic doctrine of tzimtzum (a key feature of Singer's fiction) which highlights the centrality of evil at the moment of creation or, in this case, re-creation.

What is especially pleasing about this collection is that, along with some more recent work, it contains one of Singer's earliest stories, “The Jew from Babylon”, which was originally published in Warsaw in 1932 and included with the Yiddish version of his first novel Satan in Goray (1935). Kaddish ben Mazliach, the unorthodox miracle-worker and healer in this parable, is excommunicated by the Polish Rabbinate because, like the artist that Singer was to become, he “conjures up demons”. Unable, on one last occasion, to exorcize the Evil One, Kaddish—which, ironically, means “holy”—is eventually overcome by the demons and hobgoblins he has spent a lifetime fighting. Published at the outset of Singer's career as a writer, this story acts as a metaphor for the artistic imagination which, far from being god-like, is always in danger of possessing the author and turning him into a dybbuk.

What unites Singer's Polish tales with his more recent fables set in America is, above all, a belief in the triumph of evil in the modern world. While it took Singer over twenty years to begin to exorcize the folk images of demons and angels from his consciousness and write more directly about his American experiences, the post-war stories contained in The Death of Methuselah are, paradoxically, not dissimilar from their Polish counterparts. Thus, all the fiction in this volume revolves around the primal impulses which, in this view, still dominate. Envy, jealousy and sex are the perennial concerns of these stories, which are peopled, as always, by the flotsam of modern history. And yet the ever-playful Singer is at pains to undercut each of his tales by contrasting it with its mirror-image. Erotic triangles, for instance, abound in this volume, but can represent a self-destructive restlessness as well as sexual perversity.

Rather like the figure in “The Accuser and the Accused”—who is both a Yiddish writer, a Buddhist, and a Catholic Priest—Singer is also radically ambivalent; a cabbalistic rabbi manqué and a rationalist “betrayer of Israel”. Such doubleness has always been Singer's trademark and, even though he might protest differently, this is once again confirmed by the stories in The Death of Methuselah. By spanning virtually the whole of his career as a writer, this remarkable collection, like much of his fiction, demonstrates the universality of Singer's “little world”, and makes this work a welcome addition to his 1982 Collected Stories.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Musings by a Mystic

Next

Earthly Powers

Loading...