In 1955 when she was 15 years old, Letty Cottin Pogrebin lost her mother to ovarian cancer. She describes sitting shiva:

One night, about twenty people are milling about the house but by Jewish computation there are only nine Jews in our living room. This is because only nine men have shown up for the memorial service. A minyan, the quorum required for Jewish communal prayer, calls for ten men.

“I know Hebrew.” I say, “You can count me, Daddy.”

I meant, I want to count. I meant, don't count me out just because I am a girl.

“You know it's not allowed,” he replies, frowning …

In those first weeks after losing my mother I needed to lean on my religion, rock myself in Hebrew rhythms as familiar to me as rain. But how could I mourn as a Jew if my Kaddish did not count? … The answer is I could not. I refused to be an illegitimate child in my own religion. I could not be a ghost in the minyan. If I did not count, I would not stay. I mourned as a daughter, and left Judaism behind.¹

Like Pogrebin, Isaac Bashevis Singer's heroines are coerced into making a Sophie's choice. Evelyn Torton Beck writes that Singer is misogynous. He “sees the world as essentially male-centered,”² and portrays women almost entirely in terms of their relationships with men. Singer's work, however, reflects the temper of his time and his community. In his society, communal continuity and stability were consistently given priority over individual fulfillment. Despite this fact, his oeuvre displays a potent sympathy with those independent women whose ambitions could not be accommodated by the Jewish community. Singer acknowledges the predicament of women and illuminates it with sensitivity and humor.

Jewish women in early twentieth century Eastern Europe were unequivocally second-class citizens. Women could not be counted in a prayer quorum or lead a service. “Like the minor, the deaf-mute, and the idiot, they could not serve as witnesses in a Jewish court, except for a few specified cases.”³ The life of a Hassidic Jew was guided by “mitzvot,” commandments written in the Torah and interpreted in the Talmud. The Jewish women of Singer's era had long been viewed as peripheral Jews, because they were exempt from many positive, timebound mitzvot. These mitzvot include hearing the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah, praying the three daily services, wearing a prayer shawl and phylacteries, and Torah study. Women had been “‘excused’ from most of the positive symbols which, for the male Jew, hallow time, hallow his physical being, and inform both his myth and his philosophy.”⁴

Of course women could opt to perform mitzvot that were incumbent upon men, but according to the Talmud, “Greater is he who is commanded and carries out an act, than he who is not commanded, and carries it out” (Kiddushin 31a). Therefore, the mitzvot optionally performed by a woman could never give her equal status with men whose mitzvot were obligatory.

Women's few obligatory mitzvot were closely connected to physical goals and objects. The lives of women in the shtetl revolved around physical objects and corporeal experience—cooking, cleaning, childbearing, and child rearing. Those mitzvot that were almost exclusively the province of the Jewish woman included the provision of kosher food for her family, the kindling of Sabbath candles, and postmenstrual visitation to the ritual bath in order to enable her husband to have intercourse with her. These mitzvot aided and reinforced the lifestyle of the community and the family, but did little to cultivate the relationship between the individual and God. Because women lacked an “independent spiritual life to counterbalance the materialism of [their] existence, the mind of the average woman was devoted to physical considerations: marriages, deaths, dinners, clothes, and money. It was, thus, natural that Jewish men should have come to identify women with gashmiut [physicality] and men with ruhniut [spirituality].”⁵

This identification of gashmiut with the female saturates Singer's work. For example the “Slaughterer,” who wanted to see the “higher spheres, [where] there was no death, no slaughtering … no stomachs and intestines,” supposed that his daughters “are too much and were getting too fat … they combed each other's hair and plaited it into braids. They were forever babbling … and they laughed. They looked for lice, they fought, they washed, they kissed … Why was it necessary to clothe and adorn the body so much, Yoineh Meir would wonder.”⁶

Yoineh Meir never considered teaching his daughters Torah. “Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflut [nonsense or obscenity],” said the Talmud (Sotah 20a). Despite this prohibition, another of Singer's characters, Reb Todros, does teach his daughter Torah. Yentl, of “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” loved to study the Torah, although Torah study by women had been discouraged for centuries. The Shulhan Arukh, a source widely consulted in Singer's era, says, “The sages have commanded that a man should not teach his daughter Torah, because most women do not have the intention of truly learning and they turn the teachings of the Torah into nonsense in accordance with their limited understanding” (Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh De'ah, Hilkhot Talmud Torah 246:6).⁷

Within the confines of her time and place Yentl could not accommodate both her womanhood and her beloved Torah, so she embraced the Torah and concealed her womanhood from her community, from the man she loved, and from herself. When her father dies, she cuts her hair and dresses as a man. The tragedy of her story lies in the suppression of Yentl's sexuality and gender identity, in her exile from community, and in the sorrow she bequeaths to those who have loved her.

Yentl, like the reader, believes that cross-dressing will merely disguise her superficially. But she finds herself transformed viscerally. Role-playing can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Singer explains: “to make believe is real power … life itself is a play … we put on clothes and we make believe almost that this is what we are. We forget our nakedness and we see ourselves as always dressed. When you wear a mask long enough, it becomes a part of your face.”⁸

In “Yentl” Singer says: “Only now did Yentl grasp the meaning of the Torah's prohibition against wearing the clothes of the other sex. By doing so one deceived not only others but also oneself.”⁹ After months of immersion in the exclusively male subculture of the Yeshiva, Yentl gradually acquires the gestures, the mannerisms, the thought patterns of a man. When the story began, Yentl, for the first time, had found herself in the company of young men. She had noticed “how different their talk was from the jabbering of women … but she was too shy to join in” (133). The young men had teased her and had called her “bashful. A violet by the wayside” (133). After months in disguise, Yentl undergoes a metamorphosis. She speaks “in a singsong, gesticulate[s] with her thumb, clutche[s] her sidelocks, pluck[s] at her beardless chin, ma[kes] all the customary gestures of a yeshiva student. In the heat of argument she even seize[s] Avigdor [her study partner] by the lapel and call[s] him stupid” (154).

Yentl's perception of Hadass, an eligible young woman, reveals a similar transformation. Initially, Yentl says Hadass “must consider herself a beauty, for she was always in front of the mirror, but, in fact, she was not that good-looking” (136). Avigdor asks Yentl, “She doesn't appeal to you?” “Not particularly” (136) is Yentl's ironic, heterosexual reply. Months later Yentl looks at Hadass “as she stood there—tall, blond, with a long neck, hollow cheeks, and blue eyes … Her hair, fixed in two braids, was flung back over her shoulders. A pity I'm not a man” (139), Yentl thinks. She regards Hadass with the eyes of a man and, influenced by her gashmiut, finds herself attracted to a beautiful woman. Yentl impulsively, perhaps involuntarily, says to Hadass, “You're beautiful … everyone wants you … I, too, want you” (141). Yentl is losing her heterosexual orientation, but she cannot conceive of having a homosexual attraction to a woman, and believes, “I must be going mad” (142). Frustrated that as a man she cannot marry Avigdor, whom she adores, Yentl marries Hadass and deceives her into believing their homosexual intercourse is a typical marital relationship. Eventually, Yentl can no longer endure her own duplicity and leaves the shtetl to study Torah elsewhere.

According to the narrow sex role definitions of her era, Yentl can live neither as man nor woman, homosexual nor heterosexual. No outlet affords her both intellectual and emotional fulfillment; no niche exists for her in the shtetl. Yentl's gender-identity crisis and her gashmiut, leave her friends Avigdor and Hadass in a joyless union. Singer does not misogynistically fault the women or the community, however, but the Creator who assembled the world haphazardly. “Even Heaven makes mistakes” (132), declares Reb Todros.

Singer implies that women with ambition and talent are divine errors. Only divine fallibility could account for Yentl's love of Torah. Viewed through a telescope filtered by contemporary ethics, Singer's implication is misogynous; but the shtetl community of the early twentieth century was not overly concerned with gender ethics. Singer intends his stories to resurrect a vanished world. He is consistently, intentionally, anachronistic. His works transport the reader to Singer's own childhood. For centuries talmudic Judaism had sustained numerous islands of Jewish civilization in the great sea of European Christendom. Singer's intense loyalty to the Hassidic Judaism of his parents precluded his ever suggesting that the Talmud could be ignored without the trespassor suffering dire consequences. Singer's characters cannot safely jettison such cargo.

The author is not misogynous in the context of his time and place. On the contrary, he is hypersensitive to the anguish he observed in the lives of his sister, his mother, and the female characters of his stories. He demonstrates the impossibility of a woman reconciling her intellectual ambitions with talmudic Judaism, and he never simplifies the conundrum by offering a solution to it. Still today, Orthodox women are struggling with the apparent injustices endemic to talmudic Judaism.¹⁰

Talmud study was integral to daily life throughout Singer's formative years. Singer's father, Menahem, loved the Talmud and the Torah. He was an intensely spiritual individual and leery of any contact with women. Singer saw his father turn away from any woman who approached him for fear that the very sight of a woman, her physicality, or gashmiut, would distract him from the path of righteousness and somehow compromise his spiritual nature. On the other hand, Singer saw his mother, Bathsheva, as a source of love, wisdom, and sustenance for his family.

She was a rationalist. He was aware of her great intellect, and she certainly influenced the creation of Yentl. “Once I heard her say about the Yiddish writer David Berglson that he tried to imitate Knut Hamsun … I saw my brother's eyes light up and he exclaimed, ‘Mother, you understand literature better than all our critics!’”¹¹ But unlike Yentl, Bathsheva dedicated her life to her family, though she may have chafed under her domestic burdens. In fact, Singer's nephew Maurice Carr writes that “Bathsheva carries in her womanly frame a manly spirit … The better to express her grievance against Jehovah, the bungling Maker of her misbirth, she is all the more meticulous in her observance of His divine commandments.”¹² Singer recounts:

My mother was, even at that time, an ardent feminist, or a suffragist as they called them then. Whenever she read about the cruelties in war, she would say that only women could end these murderous events. Her recipe was that all women should unite and decide not to live with their husbands until they had resolved to make peace once and forever. My mother elaborated on this idea many times, and my brother answered her, “Neither men nor women will ever unite. Nature always accomplishes what it had intended, that all life must fight for its existence.” My mother's narrow face became pale, and she said, “In that case, there will never be peace in this world.”¹³

The contradiction between Menahem's response to women and Singer's admiration of his mother defines the contradictions in Singer's vision of women. As Edward Alexander puts it: “Women often figure in his stories as the embodiment of the sensual principle which distracts men from the life of piety or the life of intellect.” But women also demonstrate the “creative principle capable of restoring life to men … in whom the springs of life have been dried up.”¹⁴ It is the woman's gashmiut that empowers her as either an obstacle to or enabler of man's spirituality.

This polarity is sustained in Singer's vision of man's relationship to woman and is underscored in the Kabbala, which serves as a subtext for Singer's work.¹⁵ Union with a woman frequently leads to “either of two antithetical culminations: a vision of chaos, as in Satan in Goray … or ‘The Destruction of Kreshev,’ [or ‘Yentl’] or a vision of order and faith, as in ‘Short Friday’ or ‘The Spinoza of Market Street.’”¹⁶ In the Kabbala, woman again takes on two roles: either that of the Shekhina, a manifestation of peace and piety, or of Lilith, the embodiment of chaos. “The loving embrace of the King and His Queen the Shekhina secured the well-being not only of Israel but also of the whole world … When the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed … the Shekhina-Matronit … went into exile … God … let the place of His departed Queen be taken by Lilith.”¹⁷ These opposing partners of the Godhead parallel Singer's dual visions of woman, as a distraction from piety and intellect or as the facilitator of the pious, intellectual life. In the Kabbala the pious union of husband and wife and/or the performance of certain prayers and rituals lead to serenity and order in the heavenly realm as well as here in the earthly realm, while the sinfulness of Israel leads to turmoil on earth and in the heavens.

Singer recognizes the internal and external conflicts engendered by the ambitious, assertive, independent woman, but regards her as a source of upheaval and a threat to communal stability. That such a woman can never find a niche in the community of the shtetl or within the milieu of the Jewish neighborhood is in keeping with the only communal context Singer knew during his formative years. Not only does Singer castigate the community for its time-bound inflexibility, but he also directs his criticism and considerable sarcasm toward the ultimate source of sexism in the shtetl: God. Singer's stories cast a gauntlet at the feet of the Creator:

“He created the world in six short winter days and has been resting ever since. There are those who are of the opinion that He didn't even work that hard.”

“Do you mean by that He wasn't the First Cause?” …

“Who else is the First Cause? He is a jealous God. He would never delegate such power. But being the cause and keeping order are different things altogether.”

(emphasis added)¹⁸

In “The Dead Fiddler,” a brilliant woman strains the communal strictures that imprison her, sowing the seeds of communal disintegration. Liebe Yentl, the only daughter of a wealthy couple, Reb Sheftel and Zise Feige, had no household chores to distract her from study and introspection. She was inordinately bright, sensitive, and paranoid: “Her head was full of whims and fancies … She averted her eyes from slaughtered fowl and from meat on the salting board … She had no friends in Shidlovtse. She complained that the girls of the town were common and backward; as soon as they were married, they became careless and slovenly. Whenever she had to go among people, she fasted the day before, for fear that she might vomit. Although she was beautiful, clever, and learned, it always seemed to her that people were laughing and pointing at her.”¹⁹

When Liebe Yentl's fiancé, Ozer, dies, she overreacts. Having only once laid eyes on Ozer, she “fell ill from grieving. Her mother heard her sobbing in the dark … She drank whole dippers full [of water] … As though … a fire were raging inside her, consuming everything” (35).

She is burning with two conflicting desires: to fulfill her potential for drama, comedy, music, and a frank, uninhibited sexual appetite; and to conform to the expectations of her parents and society by marrying. Ozer's death highlights Liebe Yentl's quandary, catalyzing her hysterics. When Liebe Yentl is again betrothed, a dybbuk, Getsl the dead fiddler, enters her, in effect choosing for her the first option. She abandons her role as a chaste Jewish maiden in order to express a complex and compelling array of talents.

Liebe Yentl has been coerced by community standards into choosing her Judaism, her genius, or her gender. She opts for genius. Only in the guise of a demon can Liebe Yentl's wit, talent, and wholesome lust be applauded by the townspeople who would have otherwise excoriated her. As Getsl the fiddler or as Beyle the whore, Liebe Yentl is able to exhibit her talents and to express an exuberant sensuality that would never have been permitted to her as a modest Jewish matron. Under the stringent restrictions of talmudic Judaism, a shtetl woman could never reveal these qualities.

As a demon, Liebe Yentl can tyrannize her parents, criticize the community's hypocrisy, and engage in unfeminine behavior: drinking, boasting, and dirty-joke telling. Graphically manifesting her gashmiut, she expresses an unrestrained corporeality, a sexuality untrammelled by talmudic laws. In the guise of Getsl or of Beyle, Liebe Yentl says she can “smell a man a mile away” (43); she downs brandy like water, says the “Worka rabbi can kiss me you know where” (48), labels holy amulets “sacred toilet paper” (43), and “[tears] off her shift and exhibit[s] her shame [genitals]” (53). She “sang ribald songs and soldier's ditties” (42), hurled insults at the townsfolk, boasted of lechery, and recited quotations from the Torah, “all of it in singsong and in rhyme” (40).

Liebe Yentl's father and brother desert the chaotic household. Her mother is too sick to hold the townspeople at bay, and they “break the door open and enter” (41), shattering the sanctity of the home. Blurring the traditional separation of the sexes, men and women commit sacrilege by dancing together to demon's music and mock the sanctity of marriage by arranging a demons' wedding.

“The Dead Fiddler” illustrates the author's ambivalence about the role of women in the Hassidic community and in society as a whole. Singer may well have believed that women's ambitions were potentially dangerous. “The Dead Fiddler” accurately reflects the fears of unrestrained female sexuality that were pervasive in Hassidic communities and in Western society. Liebe Yentl's possession has triggered the disintegration of her family, rocking the foundation of community, much as, in Singer's Hassidic and anxious view of it, any woman's overwhelming passions, if given free rein, might corrupt a whole society.

That Liebe Yentl has been possessed on the occasion of her betrothal is no coincidence. Like the “enlightened” young women of Singer's era, Liebe Yentl regards marriage in the world of the shtetl as oblivion—a monotonous, claustrophobic existence. When her two demons agree to marry, their wedding songs illustrate Liebe Yentl's ambivalence about marriage. She compares marriage to death and her future husband to a corpse.

Weep, bride, weep and moan,
Dead men fear to be alone …
Corpse and corpse, wraith and wraith,
Every demon seeks a mate.
Angel Dumah, devil, Shed,
A coffin is a bridal bed.

(51)

Her fear of marriage is underscored when, as Beyle, she screams at her mother, “Better a rotten fiddler than a creep from Zawiercia!” (52). (Shmelke Motl, Liebe Yentl's betrothed, was from Zawiercia.)

Liebe Yentl's only escape from life as a miserable housewife is the dybbuks' domain, the alternate reality of Death—what the dybbuks call the “World of Delusion” (56). This is the only world where Liebe Yentl's sensitivity and wit can reach their full potential. For I. B. Singer this “world of delusion” was clearly a possibility. He said, “It has been shown by Salomon Maimon and the neo-Kantians that … existence is nothing but a category of thinking … philosophers have finally made us realize that ‘reality’ is only reality from our point of view, from the point of view of our senses, of our consciousness.”²⁰ Liebe Yentl's demonic possession renders an alternate world, the “World of Delusion,” accessible to mortal human beings, to the reader, and to the townsfolk who, because they have not died, are limited to experiencing this dimension of reality solely through their senses.

How aptly Virginia Woolf has described Liebe Yentl's predicament and its tragic outcome:

Any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.²¹

Reading storybooks, “secretly … borrowing from her father's bookcase” (34), and walking the Gentile streets alone had given Liebe Yentl a broader, more worldly perspective than the typical shtetl maiden.

Similar to “Yentl,” in its depiction of a brilliant mind imprisoned in woman's body “The Dead Fiddler” echoes descriptions of Singer's own mother and sister. His mother had a “brain capable of storing all those volumes of Torah, Talmud, and Kabbalah, not to mention that burden of agonized grievance she carries around with her against Jehovah her Maker.”²² Like Liebe Yentl, Singer's sister, Hinde Esther, whom he called “quite a talented authoress,”²³ also “suffered from hysteria and had mild attacks of epilepsy. At times she seemed possessed by a dibbuk.”²⁴ When Hinde Esther asked her mother what she should be when she grew up, Batsheva answered, “What can a girl be?”²⁵ Hinde “had already acquired some modern ideas, and read Yiddish newspapers and books, longed for a romance, not an arranged marriage.”²⁶ Nevertheless Hinde Esther's marriage was an arranged one. She cried beforehand, “I'd rather go into exile.”²⁷ Liebe Yentl echos that plaintive cry.

The injustices suffered by Singer's mother and sister profoundly affected him. In “Yentl” Singer accepted the tyranny of the community, but with “The Dead Fiddler” he acknowledged the inability of the Hassidic community to compassionately accommodate women who could not find satisfaction in the role of wife and mother. He has since genially conceded that “the people who wrote the Talmud didn't know about the Women's Liberation.”²⁸

Singer utilized his dybbuks to expose the inhumanity of ranking dogma above individual well-being. He scathingly portrays the gross inadequacy, the almost sadistic insensitivity, of the male Hassidic response to divergent and/or marginal women typified by his mother, his sister, and Liebe Yentl. The Hassidic men, in their petty rivalry to exorcise the dybbuks, stand in stark contrast to Zise Feige, Liebe Yentl's mother. “Torturers, you're killing my child!” (“Dead Fiddler,” 53) she cries. The Hassidim of Radzymin, of Shidlovtse, and of Worka exploit Liebe Yentl merely to validate their respective dogmas and extend their respective spheres of influence. They are remarkably untroubled by the tragedy endemic to the young woman's rejection of her identity.

Liebe Yentl's father, Reb Sheftel, epitomizes the Hassidic attitude. Before the dybbuks ever emerged, Zise Feige had recognized that her daughter's behavior was eccentric. She shared her concern with Reb Sheftel, her pious husband. He responded with “a rule for everything … his only reply was, ‘When, God willing, she gets married, she will forget all this foolishness’” (34-35). More committed to his piety than to his daughter, Reb Sheftel views marriage as the solution to any young woman's problem. In the guise of Getsl, his daughter rebukes him, “You think you're so strong because your beard's long? … Better an open rake than a sanctimonious fake … You may have the Shidlovtse schlemiels fooled, but Getsl the fiddler has been around” (39). Reb Sheftel, following the instructions of his Radzymin rabbi, hangs amulets around his daughter's neck, and she responds by screaming: “Tell the Radzymin rabbi that I spit at his amulets” (43). Defiantly, Liebe Yentl ties elflocks in her father's beard.

Continuing to mock provincial Hassidic rivalries, the author candidly describes the puerile, spiteful response of the Worka Hassidim. They were “bitter opponents of the Radzymin rabbi, [and] celebrated that day with honey cake and brandy” (44). Later, the “Hassidim of the Radzymin rabbi had heard the news that the Worka talismans had failed, and they came to gloat” (54). Close to death, Liebe Yentl defies her father, a Radzymin Hasid, by capitulating to the rival Worka Hassidim. In the guise of Beyle she finally declares that the “Worka rabbi is not the Radzymin schlemiel” (48). The followers of the Worka rabbi literally bind the nude maiden to their will. When Hassidic Judaism ties her up, Getsl agrees to leave Liebe Yentl alone. “Finally, several of the Hassidim caught Liebe Yentl's hands and feet and tied her to the bed with their sashes. Then they slipped the Worka rabbi's amulets around her neck” (53). In a poignant double entendre Beyle Tslove reproaches Getsl for leaving before their wedding night: “Imp, you made a fool of a Jewish daughter all for nothing!” (55)

The violent rape of spirit that Singer has elaborated hardly appears to be a hearty endorsement of the Hassidic tradition. Singer condemns the inadequacy of the Hassidic response to a woman in agony, and his portrayal of that response accentuates its cruelty.

The significance of the demonic in this story is related to “exile and the problem of meaning.”²⁹ Liebe Yentl, in her self-imposed isolation, is exiled from the community. Why was Liebe Yentl ever born? Perhaps to fulfill herself and provide a degree of enlightenment for the skeptics of her town. If only for a few months and in disguise, she was everything she was capable of being. Every facet of a complex and creative individual scintillated and beguiled us from the stage of Liebe Yentl's sickbed. The Greek chorus of the town's rabble reveled in her virtuosity. For this she lived. On a superficial level Liebe Yentl gained nothing from her possession. She never found an acceptable outlet for her talent. She refused to marry and died poor and alone; but on a subliminal level the ordeal of demonic possession apparently galvanized her courage. Her unequivocal rejection of marriage constituted an open rebellion against the community that had bound and silenced her.

Contrast Yentl, who took a quintessentially Jewish approach to absurdity, to injustice. She immersed herself in Torah and in the slim chance for redemption her study might have afforded her. Her love of Torah transcended all other passions. For Yentl the Torah was

a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it,
And everyone that upholds it is happy
Its ways are ways of pleasantness,
And all its paths are peace.(30)

For Liebe Yentl, however, it was through her possession by supposed demons that, ironically, she exhibited her Divine gifts, her creativity, her facility with language, her musical ability. It was her storytelling, like Singer's, that opened to the town's rabble a window to an alternative titillating “World of Delusion” where empirical reality “hangs by a thread.”³¹

Notes

1. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991), 43-50.

2. Evelyn Torton Beck, “I. B. Singer's Misogyny,” Lillith, no. 6 (1979): 35.

3. Paula Hyman, “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition,” in The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 106.

4. Rachel Adler, “The Jew Who Wasn't There: Halakhah and the Jewish Woman,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 13.

5. Ibid., 15.

6. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Slaughterer,” in The Seance and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 21, 22-23.

7. As translated by Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law (New York: Schocken Books), 37.

8. Grace Farrell, ed., Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 197.

9. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” in Short Friday and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 140; hereafter cited in the text.

10. On this see Blu Greenberg, “Is Now the Time for Orthodox Women Rabbis?” Moment 18 (December 1993): 50-53, 74; Haviva Krasner-Davidson, “Why I'm Applying to Yeshiva U,” Moment 18 (December 1993): 54-55, 97.

11. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1984), xxxii.

12. Maurice Carr, “My Uncle Yitzhak: A Memoir of I. B. Singer,” Commentary 94, no. 6 (December 1992): 26.

13. Singer, Love and Exile, xxxii.

14. Edward Alexander, Isaac Bashevis Singer (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 135.

15. For an extended discussion of Singer and Kabbalah, see Grace Farrell Lee, From Exile to Redemption: The Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), especially chap. 2.

16. Morris Golden, “Dr. Fischelson's Miracle: Duality and Vision in Singer's Fiction,” in The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Marcia Allentuck (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 26.

17. Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess. 3d enl. ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 159-60. “The myth of Lilith the child-killer remained a potent factor in the lives of the tradition-bound Jews down to the 19th century,” explains Patai, 240.

18. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Warehouse,” in The Seance and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 134.

19. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Dead Fiddler,” in The Seance and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 34; hereafter cited in the text.

20. Richard Burgin, “Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, 245.

21. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 49.

22. Carr, “Uncle Yitzhak,” 29.

23. Singer, Fun der alter un nayer heym (Of the Old and New Home) 6 June 1964, quoted in Anita Norich, “The Family Singer and the Autobiographic Imagination,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 106n, 14.

24. Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father's Court (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 151.

25. Clive Sinclair, “Esther Singer Kreitman: The Trammeled Talent of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Neglected Sister,” Lilith (Spring 1991): 8.

26. Singer, Father's Court, 153.

27. Ibid., 155.

28. Grace Farrell Lee, “Stewed Prunes and Rice Pudding: College Students Eat and Talk with I. B. Singer,” Contemporary Literature 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 456.

29. Farrell Lee, From Exile to Redemption, 32.

30. Adapted from Proberbs 3:17 in Rabbinical Assembly of America and the United Synagogue of America, Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book (United States of America, 1973), 136.

31. Singer, “Dead Fiddler,” 51.