SOURCE: Roskies, David G. “The Demon as Storyteller: Isaac Bashevis Singer.” A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, pp. 266-306. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Roskies analyses Singer's work in the context of his Yiddish background, focusing particularly on his use of the image of the devil in his writing.]

If Hell exists, everything exists. If you are real,
He is real.

—I. B. Singer, 1943

Nothing is more Jewish than a Jewish demon. What the golden-haired Lorelei are to the Rhine, the dark-haired sheydim are to the Jewish home, creeping out from behind the stove on a Sabbath afternoon, when the household is away at prayers. From birth until death a Jew must contend with these sheydim, who eat and drink just like humans; with ruḥin, disembodied spirits, and with lilin, who are possessed of human form but also have wings. Ketev Meriri is most harmful at noon and in the heat of summer, while Lilith, Samael's consort, attacks newborn infants and their mothers. (This goes back to a time before time when Adam and Lilith got into a marital squabble; together, nonetheless, they produced many demons.) Jewish men, warned by the mystics of demons that are sired from every nocturnal emission, had good reason to tremble at bedtime. Bratslav hasidim recite a prayer composed by Reb Nahman to guard against such acts of pollution. And when, at death's door, a Jew's soul literally is up for grabs, the living must enlist all their accumulated wisdom to ward off the demons who live for this very moment.¹

It was a rich field for Jewish preachers, of the old school and the new. The maskilim were especially fond of exploiting Samael-Ashemdai, king of the demons, to articulate a program for religious reform, to expose his unholy alliances among the Jews, or, most radically, to personify evil both on earth and in heaven. Of the maskilic writers, only Abramovitsh-Mendele dared to cast Ashmedai as arch antisemite, reactionary, and root cause of universal strife. The devil's powerful presence and supernatural powers in Mendele's The Mare (1873) argued for the moral regression of humankind and marked a turning point in the political fortunes of the Jewish Enlightenment.²

Yet so long as he was clothed in allegorical garb, the devil of modern Jewish literature remained a cloak for something quite human. From first to last, Peretz portrayed a devil who was decadent, phlegmatic, skeptical—and subject to protocol. “One morning,” we read in Monish (1888), Peretz's “tragicomic poem,”

as Samael lay in bed smoking cigarettes,
and Lilith saw to her toilette
by the light of the tsoyer
(the gem that lights the ark),
the doorbell tinkled in the foyer:
“Enter!”
and there a trembly demon stood,
teeth all a-clatter,
who flung himself flat on his face and then flatter.

The scene is Ararat, where Noah's ark rested after the flood, but humanity has fallen so far since then that the legendary tsoyer (Gen. 6:16), which once illuminated the ark, is now but a light in Lilith's boudoir. In such decadent surroundings, the devil perforce speaks a Germanized Yiddish (“Herein!” is what he actually cries), and his surrogates down below appear in the guise of wealthy merchants from Danzig. The seduction of the virtuous—and very handsome—Talmud prodigy named Monish is as farcical as the demons who conspire against him.³

Following Peretz's lead, Yiddish storytellers turned out demonological tales that were ever more upbeat and celebratory. Sholem Aleichem rescued “The Haunted Tailor” (1901) from the clutches of the ogre-like innkeeper Dodi with a little sermon on the beneficent power of laughter. S. Ansky in 1912-1917 transformed the dybbuk from a sinner to a saint and made Khonon a victor beyond the grave. Exactly thirty years after Monish, Der Nister wrote “Demons” (1918), still believing that freedom and creativity could vanquish the forces of skepticism. Not until a decade later, in that horrific “Tale of an Imp, of a Mouse, and of Der Nister Himself,” did Yiddish-speaking demons regain some of their venality, vulgarity, and malevolence. But it was too late to reverse the betrayal of Jewish demonology in the name of secular humanism.

It would take a writer thoroughly versed in modern and classical Jewish sources to rehabilitate the powers of darkness; a writer who could wage a fierce oedipal struggle with the very literature that spawned him and who, in the wake of a midlife crisis, discovered storytelling as the consummate demonic art. Some have claimed Isaac Bashevis Singer to be the very image of the demons he wrote about and professed to believe in. One artist even sketched him accordingly. Reading Singer in the original and from start to finish, however, allows us to see him for what he really was: never more Yiddish than when writing about demons; never more playful, youthful, or hopeful than when writing as a demon.

Singer's life, like that of other born-again Jewish storytellers, follows the pattern of rebellion, loss, and return. At a certain point in his career he found his way back to Jewish fantasy and folklore; to a simplified world where people still sat around for hours swapping a good yarn; and to a superidiomatic Yiddish that was no longer spoken. Having found a formula that worked, Singer did what other Yiddish rebels had done before him: he rewrote his own life to make it seem as if it had all been preordained. To be sure, he added spice to the story by throwing in some scenes of bedroom and boudoir, and made much of being a loner, a pariah, and a heretic. But for all that, Singer's autobiographical persona was as much a fiction as Monish, seduced and abandoned; as the happy-go-lucky Sholem Nokhem-Veviks, hero of From the Fair; and as Shmuel-Aba Abervo, the angelic visitor from paradise. Yiddish literature provided Yitskhok Singer, the rebellious son and grandson of Polish rabbis, first with an escape route from the crumbling edifice of orthodox Judaism, then with the means of reclaiming some part of the ruins, there to nurture and redirect his formidable talents.

The familiar facts, known to almost every reader of contemporary fiction, are these.⁴

(1) My name: Yitskhok Singer. My father's: Rabbi Pinkhes Menakhem. (2) Born in the small town of Leoncin near the Vistula, where my father was the rabbi. Born 1904. (3) My mother's name Bathsheba, daughter of the Bilgoraj Rabbi, in the Lublin Province. (4) Religious education. Studied for a short while in the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary Tahkemoni. (5) Moved to Warsaw when I was three years old.

From here on in, the biographies of Y. Bashevis, pen name of Yitskhok Singer, a card-carrying member of the Polish-Yiddish literary establishment, and I. B. Singer, the magician of West 86th Street, diverge in so many ways that it would be too confusing to play one off against the other.

So let us begin with a Yiddish storyteller whose life is free of serious obstacles, since he learned everything he needs to know about art in his father's court and mother's kitchen on Krochmalna Street, and everything that will inspire him to become the chronicler of Polish Jewry he saw with his own eyes in a prelapsarian shtetl called Bilgoraj between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. The third of four children crowded into a Warsaw tenement, young Isaac is clearly meant to become a writer.

I was still a little boy, so I was allowed to look at women. I observed all kinds of shenanigans in this [rabbinical court]room, and my head was full of thoughts and fantasies. It occurred to me that perhaps the bride and groom weren't human at all, but demons? … Maybe the young man is a sorcerer from Madagascar and he placed her under a spell? I had come upon quite a few such tales in the storybooks I read. I already felt then that the world is full of wonders.⁵

Doubtless he is destined to become the kind of writer who makes the fantastical real while reveling in the metaphysics of human love and passion. For when his mind is bursting with all the marvelous goings-on inside the apartment, young Isaac can always cool off on the balcony where he contemplates the larger scheme of things, and where no one else but he ever ventures.⁶

Everything he reads is grist for the mill: Yiddish storybooks, the Talmud (especially the tale about the man and the harlot), the Kabbalah, even Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. In the Darwinian struggle for survival that rages in the neighborhood heder to which he is consigned, the dreamy-eyed Isaac finally wins over “The Strong Ones” by retelling them stories out of “literature.” Thankfully, he spends almost no time receiving formal instruction in heder, so rich is the informal instruction he receives at home. “Although later in life I read a great deal of philosophy,” he tells us in an editorial aside, “I never found more compelling arguments than those that came up in my own kitchen. I even heard at home the strange facts that are in the province of psychic research.”⁷ But Isaac is often left painfully alone with his questions concerning God, creation, heaven, and hell because his older brother Israel Joshua is busy painting realistic landscapes and reading Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin.

The home, when you come down to it, is a study in solitudes and irreconcilable contrasts. Father sits in his room all day and hates to be distracted from the study of Torah. Mother is where she belongs, in the kitchen, because “at that time it was a woman's accepted lot to bear children, run the household, and earn a living” (Y 141, E 44). Whenever the litigants invade her kitchen, or something particularly egregious happens in the room next door, her wig will get disheveled, and the contest between her “cold logic” and father's unquestioning faith will invariably begin (“Why the Geese Shrieked”). And how could it be otherwise, seeing that Krochmalna Street itself is a study in contrasts: Jewish whores with hearts of gold (“A Wedding”); learned publishers who smuggle on the side (“My Father's Friend”); businessmen so corrupt they would forge a rabbi's signature (“They Forged My Father's I.O.U.”); vulgarity and refinement in one and the same person (“The Purim Gift”). There are also any number of hidden saints, such as Reb Chayim Gorshkover, who loves nothing better than reciting Psalms and reminiscing about Gorzkow; Reb Asher the Dairyman, “whose whole life was one big Yes”; and the unnamed Polish washerwoman, who couldn't die until she returned the Singers' laundry.

From Krochmalna Street, the best school a budding writer could want, the thirteen-year-old Singer is whisked away by his mother to the Polish equivalent of Brigadoon. Leaving the harsh and hungry German-occupied city of Warsaw for his ancestral home within the Austrian war zone, Singer unwittingly reverses the trajectory of every other Yiddish writer. No one ever goes back to the shtetl, save on a statistical or ethnographic mission. Yet Bilgoraj is home to uncles, aunts, and attractive cousins; a preserve of a vanished Jewishness and an older, uncorrupted Polish-Yiddish speech. “In this world of old Jewishness I found a spiritual treasure trove,” writes Singer wistfully. “I had a chance to see our past as it really was. Time seemed to flow backwards. I lived Jewish history” (E 290). For the benefit of his Yiddish readers he adds: “Everything inside of me said: This must someday be described” (Y 340).

Conversely, Bilgoraj is a place to make new friends and to eat from the tree of secular knowledge. Back in Warsaw, Boruch Dovid the orphan boy taught him the secrets of the Kabbalah and the facts of life (“Reb Yekl Saffir”). Here, in the shtetl, young people are openly reading forbidden books, writing and speaking in Hebrew. Constrained by his rabbinic lineage, Isaac does most of his reading in an attic. It is here that he falls under the spell of Spinoza.

Because In My Father's Court was Singer's first “experiment in joining memoir and fiction,” and was written by the second of his literary personae, Yitskhok Warshawski, an official stenographer and occasional literary critic of the Jewish Daily Forward (D. Segal, his cover as a tabloid journalist, was the third), it lays bare the strengths and weaknesses of his storytelling art. Where the plot is too thin to fill up the weekly installment, Warshawski relies on contrivances, a mysterious knock on the door, a string of rhetorical questions to suggest a preternatural occurrence, an interlude on the balcony where the precocious narrator philosophizes. Yet the experiment also gives play to the multiplicity of voices and perspectives that make up a communal speech act. First there are the litigants themselves, divided over every issue. Then there are Pinkhes Menakhem and Bathsheba Singer, at odds with each other over the proper course of action. Finally there is the narrator, who stands both in the story and out. Warshawski does a sloppy job juggling his worldly perspective with that of the actors involved, whose very faith is on the line. To compensate, he prefaces the work with a mini-sermon on the universal import of the Beth Din. The ideal of human progress, Warshawski preaches, is a return to the model of the rabbinical court. “There can be no justice without godliness,” he warns.⁸

Singer had many reasons to rehabilitate the moribund institutions of the Polish-Jewish past. One was to rewrite his own biography. Another was to expand his creative repertory. Still another was messianic. With this experiment, as with the distillations in story form, Singer found the best medium for conveying his conservative outlook on life. Whereas the fantastical and hypnotic tales of Der Nister held out a utopian vision of a future that had never existed in the past, and the deceptively simple Bible poems of Itzik Manger conjured up a restorative image fusing present and past, the learned and sometimes occult tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer aimed at subverting the present in the name of a more perfect, if intransigent, past. In the beginning there was little Itchele Singer, training to become a traditional storyteller. And in the end of days, there would again be storytelling, rooted in God and an absolute standard of morality.

The other, demythologized, life of Yitskhok Singer is antimessianic to a fault. When submitting his biography for a new edition of a Yiddish lexicon that would never appear, Singer made no mention of his sojourn in Bilgoraj. “(5) Moved to Warsaw when I was three years old. (6) Began writing in Hebrew … Soon went over to Yiddish.” The rest was taken up with the Yiddish dailies he wrote for, the literary periodicals he contributed to and coedited (with his lifelong friend Aaron Zeitlin), the major European novels he translated, and the one book he published, Satan in Goray, before moving to New York. Altogether, this modest document bespoke a career within the mainstream of Polish-Yiddish letters.⁹

The real Yitskhok Singer was on the inside literary track not because of his orthodox upbringing, but through the efforts and example of his older brother. After a bruising experience in Kiev and Moscow, where he felt betrayed by the modernist mandarins Der Nister and Bergelson, Israel Joshua Singer moved back to Warsaw in 1921. Warsaw was rapidly becoming the political, pedagogical, and publishing center of secular Yiddish culture, and I. J. Singer wasted no time there. In 1922 he teamed up with Peretz Markish and Melekh Ravitch to found Khalyastre, the first expressionist journal in Yiddish, and with the same team (plus Nachman Meisel) founded the secular Yiddishist Literarishe bleter in 1924. Since Isaac had just moved back to Warsaw himself, Israel Joshua landed him his first real job as a proofreader (and occasional staff writer) for the new literary weekly. It took another year for Isaac to stand on his own feet as a writer of fiction, a year of crisis and profound self-doubt. His blind submission finally won that paper's short-story contest and was published, pseudonymously, in June 1925. Five months later “Yitskhok Bashevis” made his first appearance, the pen name Singer thereafter used for all his serious fiction.¹⁰

In those days, naturalism was the dominant school of serious Yiddish fiction, particularly in Poland, and twenty-one-year-old Bashevis was its ardent disciple. The very titles of the short stories and novellas he published from 1925 to 1932 (and refused to republish) were a dead giveaway: “In Old Age,” “In the Cellar,” “A Village Undertaker,” “In the World of Chaos,” “On the Way Back,” “In an Old House,” “Remnants,” “Between Walls,” “The Déclassé,” “In the End of Days.” This was textbook naturalism of the kind that I. M. Weissenberg, Joseph Opatoshu, Oyzer Warshawski, A. M. Fuks and even I. J. Singer had been writing in Yiddish for quite some time. All the characters were drawn from or consigned to the lower strata of society. Ruled by hereditary factors and instinctual drives, they usually acted in a self-destructive way. When Shamay Vayts (1929) got tough, as he had many occasions to do in Warsaw, his ears would get red, just like his late father's. In lieu of individual heroes, there were “Women” (1925), “Sisters” (1926), “Two” (1930), and “The Déclassé” (1931). The dialogue read like a transcript of everyday speech.¹¹

Most breathtaking in their bleakness and depravity were young Bashevis' slices of traditional Jewish life. The drunken recluse, Reb Sender Leyvi Karver, of hasidic lineage, who drove his wife to an early grave, who could not remember whether he had buried his daughter, and who was now left with a severely retarded son, finally took the only viable course of action: he hanged himself. The story's title says it all: Behold the “Eyniklekh,” the hasidic “Grandchildren” or “Descendants” of our spiritual aristocracy. Or take Reb Beynish Bialodrevner, at the opposite end of the orthodox spectrum, once a leading rabbinic authority in Poland. He had long since stopped opening his mail and was refusing all human contact now that he was left without progeny. No one would ever learn of his rabbinic scholarship because his arduous trip to Warsaw failed to secure a publisher. “The Torah is not yet dead!” he shouted upon leaving the Jacobi Press with a last spark of fervor, but by the time Reb Beynush reached home, he himself was as good as dead. This was truly “The End of Days.”¹²

Singer's landscape, in which all the sustaining structures—familial, communal, spiritual, political—had failed, was familiar to any reader of postwar Yiddish fiction, where all survivors face the end alone. The expressionists, moreover, recently upped the ante by perfecting an apocalyptic art, complete with mythic imagery of destruction and redemption. Singer branded this form of writing exhibitionistic on the grounds that it tore down barriers and tried to “penetrate directly to the very essence.” Consistent realists, he countered, accepted the binding limitations of narrative as the first condition of success. “In graphic form it isn't possible to render everything,” he concluded his manifesto of 1927, “but everything in a realistic narrative must be given graphic form.”¹³

Even while defending the fiction writer who is sentenced to details, Singer was already testing the limits of realism. The problem was how to communicate the full complexity of the individual through objective description alone. Only in dialogue could one have a “tiny window” into the unseen inner life of the characters. The problem was more acute when the character was an intellectual. Was the consistent realist forced into favoring the folk types, those who didn't think too much? And in general were there no other direct sources, apart from the natural world apprehended through the senses?

One extreme answer came from Aaron Zeitlin (1899-1974), the most formative influence on Singer after his own brother. Zeitlin and Bashevis both came from rabbinic homes, were shy and standoffish, and read a lot. Soon after they met in the Warsaw Yiddish writers' club, they appeared next to each other in the pages of a massive literary miscellany, the first of its kind in postwar Poland. Here Bashevis' hypernaturalist story, “Descendants,” rubbed shoulders with Zeitlin's zealous manifesto, “The Cult of Nothingness and Art as It Ought To Be.” Zeitlin presented only two alternatives: either what he called a “cosmic art” or “the mirroring of nothing in one's own nothingness,” as displayed, for example, in the writings of I. M. Weissenberg. Zeitlin's cosmic art was another name for Italian futurism, though nowhere did Zeitlin reveal the source. What Marinetti and others of his school had tried to achieve through pseudomathematical equations, spiraling geometric forms, musical terminology, and above all the glossolalia of machines, Zeitlin proposed achieving through the mystical sources of Jewish culture: “We, the people of Song of Songs poems and Zohar-plastic global visions, have become the most inartistic people of all, because we're stuck in a reflexive art and have lost the irrational and unrealistic artistic instinct.”¹⁴

This was creative betrayal. Just as Hillel Zeitlin (Aaron's father), along with Peretz and Berdyczewski, betrayed Hasidism a generation earlier in the name of neoromanticism and Nietzsche's transvaluation of values, so was the Kabbalah being reclaimed in the name of revolutionary values. Aaron and Isaac did not turn to the wellsprings of Jewish mysticism because their fathers were kabbalists. That, if anything, would have guaranteed the opposite. Only the discarded past could safely be refashioned in one's own iconoclastic image. “From childhood I had been steeped in Chassidism, cabala, miracles, and all kinds of occult beliefs and fantasies,” Singer would write in his fictional autobiography. “After lengthy stumbling and groping I rediscovered what I had been carrying within me the whole time.”¹⁵ But why, and how? That is something he never revealed, for that would make the story too secular, too predictable, and too Yiddish. Born-again kabbalists had to cover their tricks; otherwise who would believe in their magic?

The elitist, antipopulist thrust of Zeitlin's manifesto must have appealed to Bashevis, based as it was on a very esoteric body of knowledge. Yet so long as Bashevis remained true to his artistic credo, he could not render irrational powers using only the tools of mimetic realism. “In the World of Chaos” (1928), Bashevis' first sortie into “kabbalism,” shows just how difficult the conversion to irrational art would be. “Certain that he had thoroughly mastered the practical Kabbalah, that he knew the magical names and had penetrated the most hidden reaches of the upper spheres, Shimen decided to correct that which Joseph della Reina had spoiled: to discover Satan and mercilously destroy him.”¹⁶ There followed a horribly grotesque story, another slice of decaying shtetl life. Shimen, it soon emerged, was not merely a study in extreme isolation and self-deprivation; the young kabbalist was stark raving mad.¹⁷ The “mysteries of the Kabbalah” were as unassimilable for Shimen as for the tough realist who committed him to paper.

The other side of reality for a struggling Yiddish writer in interwar Poland was not Satan but shund, trashy novels. To stay alive you had to be on the payroll of a political party or write for one of the Warsaw Yiddish tabloids. Yiddish literature had by this time become thoroughly professionalized; there was something for everyone—even scintillating potboilers bordering on pornography. In the first round of flailing between the yellow press and the ideological purists, which took place in 1924, the purists won, thanks to a vigorous campaign launched by the bundist Undzer folkstsaytung and the new Literarishe bleter. The serialized trashy novels that ran an average of three to an issue in the Varshever radio and elsewhere were temporarily discontinued. Facing fierce competition from the Polish-language press, the Yiddish dailies tried again, in 1929, and this time even the combined efforts of the Bund and the Orthodox Agudas Yisroel couldn't deliver the final blow.¹⁸

Chief among the writers who churned out recycled trash (sometimes produced by committee and almost always published anonymously) were none other than Aaron Zeitlin and Yitskhok Bashevis. Threats (launched by Kadia Molodowsky) to blackball pornographers and exclude them from the Yiddish writers' club were to no avail. The communists even published their names for all to see. The sensationalist tabloids like Undzer ekspres were simply putting on too good a show, with their screaming headlines, personal advice columns, sports pages, beauty contests, matchmaking services, public opinion polls, and even signed and serious fiction.¹⁹ Among the latter were a number of sketches, some of them extremely witty, by Y. Bashevis: “Berl Formalist,” a farce about a one-man political party; a farcical biography of Dr. Feinschmeker, “The Aesthete”; a brief note on beards, blushing, and bad writing; the veiled autobiographical story of a student teaching “In a Dump” who manages to find love. There was light and laughter here, such as Bashevis would not rediscover for many years to come.²⁰

The next joint venture by Aaron Zeitlin and Yitskhok Bashevis was a Yiddish monthly with the unfrivolous and pretentious title Globus (The Globe). This became the forum for Bashevis to launch an all-out attack on engagé literature of any stripe. “The real poet, so long as he lives, will never serve the hangman,” he proclaimed in his manifesto “To the Question of Poetry and Politics.”²¹ “The poet embodies the categorical imperative.” In defense of pure art, Bashevis dared in the pages of Globus to topple the giant of modern Yiddish prose, David Bergelson, for selling his soul to the communist hangman, and expended almost as much effort demolishing the first novel of a Polish-Yiddish writer on strictly artistic grounds.²² Bashevis was flexing his critical muscles in advance of the serial publication in Globus of his first major work, Satan in Goray.²³

The medieval Polish shtetl of Goraj, torn apart by the messianic heresy of Shabbetai Zvi, becomes Bashevis' fictional laboratory within which to explore the moral and political crisis of contemporary Jewry. The illusion of historicity is brilliantly sustained by several layers of stylization; by short syncopated sentences; by a heavily Hebraicized and archaic diction; by embedded rhymes, a richness of descriptive detail, a grotesque landscape redolent with demons, golems, messianic signs, and portents. The characters, drawn from the rabbinic or monied aristocracy, are larger than life and arranged in binary oppositions: Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, his body and soul intact in the wake of the Ukrainian massacres, versus the broken and impoverished Eliezer Babad; Itche Mates, who abnegates his body and views sex in theological terms, as opposed to the charismatic and sexually active Reb Gedalye.²⁴

Standing in the eye of the storm is Rechele, her weird behavior psychologically grounded by virtue of her total isolation as a child, her special education, her suppressed sexuality. She is the first character Bashevis turns successfully into a metaphysical portrait. Instead of embodying the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of the divinity, as she herself imagines, she becomes the kelippah, the shell into which evil finds its way. Itche Mates is attracted to her because of her wildness; he sees in her the unclean vessel that must be purified. Manipulated by all, she is finally left to Satan.

The ending is a tour de force. Inspired by a seventeenth-century maysebikhl about an exorcism in the town of Korec, the storybook finale showcases Bashevis' virtuosity. More to the point, its pious formulas deliver the story's antimodernist message. Primed by all the data and detail to expect a resolution on the plane of history, the reader is left baffled. Whatever happens to the town proper? To the rabbi's sons? Does Reb Mordecai Joseph, the penitent sinner, become the community's new spiritual leader, as this marvelous and patriarchal narrative suggests? Why does the arch-villain Reb Gedalye get off scot-free? For all the revealing facts about Rechele's psychological makeup, how is it that her dybbuk has a biography of his own, totally separate from the Sabbatean heresy that presumably gained him entry to her body in the first place? By collapsing history and psychology into a moral parable, as the characters themselves might have done, the storyteller frustrates any secular, twentieth-century reading of the story, which in turn delivers the ideological punch. The only thing that can save society from being destroyed by its self-appointed prophets is the artificial imposition of a moral order from above. Lest there be any doubt that even normative society is corrupt to its core, the dybbuk blasphemes openly against the entire religious and social order.²⁵

Above all, Satan in Goray is a terrific story. The only other place one could find such plots (Married to Two Men, Possessed by a Dybbuk) was in the pages of the yellow press. By returning to premodern times Bashevis could transcend the poverty of Jewish life in Poland. He could discard the modernist tradition he had been trying so hard to emulate, the “lyrical prose à la Hamsun, à la Bergelson, where you take a single piece of action and make endless variations on it, like a leitmotif in a symphony.” It had taken him years, he later admitted (in Yiddish but not in English), before he realized that this kind of writing was not for him because to survive as a writer he needed a good plot.²⁶ By returning to a time when Satan was real, moreover, he could heed Zeitlin's call for a cosmic art and find metaphysical experiences that arose out of a concrete historical moment.

Once again in the history of Yiddish letters the experience of writing for a newspaper, of being wedded to the world of facts and forced to produce copy under deadline, proved beneficial to the career of a self-styled modernist. In the 1880s, the novelist and stockbroker Solomon Rabinovitsh delighted Yiddish newspaper readers as the all-knowing, ever-present, and slightly naughty Sholem Aleichem, just as writing for the press later taught him how to turn even the grimmest news into the stuff of everyday miracles. Newspapers did not penetrate the Singer home, apparently, until the very eve of World War I, and young Itchele had a hard time assimilating their diction and zany mix of piety and sensational romance.²⁷ Writing for that same press two decades later allowed the uncompromising young realist to let his hair down on occasion, as he experienced the freedom of an outlandish plot, a satisfying ending, a good laugh. Satan in Goray was Bashevis's synthesis of romance and novel, past and present, metaphysics and life. But could it appeal to popular taste?

Abraham Cahan, the tsar of American Yiddish letters, believed it could. The talent scout for many of Yiddish literature's brightest and best (including I. J. Singer), Cahan hired Bashevis to write for the Jewish Daily Forward, which, at the height of the Depression, was a plum of a job. Bashevis promptly began the serial publication there of The Sinful Messiah (Jacob Frank, 1726-1791), so dismal an artistic failure in the eyes of its author (though not of the editor) that Bashevis stopped writing fiction for the next seven years (1936-1942).²⁸ The thirty-two-year-old novelist was now lost in America.

The midlife crises that run like a faultline through the biographies of the great Yiddish writers seemed to grow in severity. Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, and Ansky each picked himself up with relative speed, perhaps because all three were in great demand. Der Nister, casting about for a new home, found a temporary haven in Weimar and a utopian solution in the Soviet Ukraine, never suspecting that storytellers would be the first targets of the new Inquisition. In the midst of the Holocaust, Itzik Manger suffered a complete breakdown, for what was the point of being the troubadour to a dead people? Singer's crisis of faith was curiously egocentric, if no less profound: he stopped believing both in his own artistic abilities and in Yiddish itself.

“The seed of redemption,” wrote Ansky in The Dybbuk, “is contained within the fall.” When I. B. Singer recouped his losses in 1943, the annus mirabilis of his career, he did so in both theory and practice, after “subjecting the literary traditions to ruthless scrutiny.” The substance of what Bashevis had to say was not new, but the timing was stunning. In August the leading Yiddish literary monthly Di tsukunft (The Future) published a Holocaust issue to honor the memory of Polish Jewry. Marc Chagall's “The Martyr” (1940), the most Jewish of his crucifixion series to date, had pride of place, in lieu of an editorial. Amid a chorus of laments and jeremiads, Bashevis produced a sober, unsentimental, and devastating critique of Yiddish literature in Poland.²⁹

His was a two-pronged attack, exposing the formal limitations of the Jewish intelligentsia in interwar Poland and the inherent limitations of Yiddish language and culture. Like Peretz before him, Bashevis disparaged the worldly pretensions of Yiddish writers. The sum total of their European culture was borrowed forms and imported ideologies. Futurism, all the rage, was but an escapade in literary Sabbateanism. These experiments not only underscored their provincialism, their narrow intellectual horizons, but also revealed how utterly unsuited was the Yiddish language itself to negotiate in the modern world. And so when all the false messiahs failed them, the writers had to start using the expressive vocabulary of a yidish-kayt in which they no longer believed. Yiddish writing in Poland, he concluded, had been godly without a God and worldly without a world. “Zi iz geven getlekh on a got, veltlekh on a velt” (471).

Yet all along, in their own backyard, was the shtetl, the perfect laboratory of modernity and its discontents. To conjure up that microcosm of tradition and revolution, Yiddish writers need not have relied on personal memory. They could have gone out and worked the shtetl field. Each shtetl had its own unique character and local legends. Much like Peretz, then, whose name he invoked as the standard bearer of renewal, Bashevis concluded his manifesto by reminding the wayward modernists of their own neglected treasures. No matter that he falsified the historical record and issued aesthetic judgments that were as myopic as they were self-serving (only I. J. Singer and Zeitlin come out looking good). As an ideological critique, “Concerning Yiddish Literature in Poland” was far-reaching and profound. The know-your-land movement in Poland, which had indeed made an effort to reclaim the shtetl for modern Jews, had done so in the name of doikayt, the struggle for cultural autonomy and national rights. For Yitskhok Bashevis, writing in America, the rediscovered folk life of shtetl Jews was an aesthetic and intellectual resource predicated on the collapse of all temporal hopes. The best Polish-Yiddish writers, he said, could already foresee the disaster.

Bashevis was not only unshaken by the Holocaust; he felt vindicated by it. Now liberated from the petty politics and illusory dreams of the entire Yiddish writers' club, he was ready to strike out on his own. The seed of redemption was contingent on the fall.

Harsher still was Bashevis' verdict on American Yiddish culture. Published in a little magazine, “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America” was so controversial in its cultural pessimism that it carried a disclaimer from the editors.³⁰ What Singer argued is that Yiddish as a modern secular language was dead. More precisely, since Yiddish in America had become an obsolescent language, spoken by a marginal sector of American Jews, it was impossible for Yiddish prose writers to render the totality of the American Jewish experience in the language they had from home. The writers were faced with two equally unacceptable choices: either to use the vulgar Yiddish actually spoken in America or to invent a pseudo-language to cover the full range of American Jewish life and thought. “It sounds almost laughable,” he claimed, “when someone writes: Dvoyre-Leye iz avek tsu Vanemeykern un gekoyft a koftl (Devorah-Leah went to Wanamakers and bought a jacket).” Or try writing this sentence in a Yiddish story: “When Benny returned on the ferry from Staten Island, Pessy served him a supper of lamb chops with mashed potatoes and string beans, smothered in gravy.” Rendered in pure idiomatic Yiddish, it would sound like this: “Ven Bunem hot zikh umgekert af der prom fun Stetn Ayland, hot im Pese-Brayne derlangt a vetshere fun shepsene kotletl mit tseribene kartofl, mit arbes-shoytn, bashmoltsn mit brotyoykh.” But in real life, an American Jew would put it this way: “Ven Benny hot zikh umgekert af der Stetn Ayland ferry hot im Pessy derlangt a supper fun lem tshops mit meshed potatoes mit string beans bashmoltn mit gravy.” Singer couldn't imagine a writer using such “potato Yiddish.”

To cut the Gordian knot, Singer proposed a radical solution: renounce the present in favor of the past; renounce America in favor of an Old World setting where at least the characters used Yiddish as an integral part of their lives. Books of history, theology, folklore—the world of sforim—would provide the Yiddish writer with materials where contemporary life had buried all hope.

Even with so bleak a prognosis, however, Singer did not advocate a return to the past for its own sake. He responded to the revolutionary impulse in the art of creative betrayal as well as to its restorative program. The past was to be retrieved in the name of values and sensibilities gleaned in the contemporary world. The catchword for this modern agenda was psycho-analysis. Just because the characters, settings, and themes would be drawn from the past, he wrote, was no reason not to apply the best tools that western civilization had to offer. Even though, in other words, the return to storytelling would exact a huge price from the Yiddish prose writers, requiring them to renounce all claims to the present, it would still revitalize the literature: from within, by forcing it to draw on its religious and historical heritage; from without, by introducing a spirit of modernist inquiry and pessimism into a literature that was too idealistic for its own good.

“We believe that the Jewish attachment to the past can accommodate an extremely progressive outlook,” Bashevis wrote in conclusion, “for the history of the Jewish people is the history of an ongoing revolution against the powers of darkness.” These were fighting words, and the way to turn them into the craft of fiction was through the yeyster-hore, the power of darkness lodged in the soul of every Jew, male or female, rich or poor, young or old, learned or simple. It was through a demonic narrator who knew everything about this world and the next, and who read everything, from the Mayse-bukh and the Tales of Reb Nahman to Gogol, Dostoevsky, Peretz, and Sholem Asch. It was through monologues reverberating with Jewish learning, wit, and anger. It was through Yiddish storytelling, turned into a demonic art.

S'vert gezogt, dos ikh der yeytser-hore, nider arop oyf der erd un red on tsu zind; dernokh gey ikh oyf in himl un bin mekatreg. Der emes iz, az ikh bin oykh der yeniker, vos gib dem zindikn di ershte shmits, ober ikh tu dos ale mol mit a shpitsl, s'zol kloymersht oyszen vi a derekh-hateve, azoy az di andere poyshim zoln zikh nisht aropnemen keyn muser, nor vayter zinken in sheol-takhtis.³¹

They say that I, the Evil Spirit, after descending to earth in order to induce people to sin, will then ascend to Heaven to accuse them. As a matter of fact, I am also the one to give the sinner the first push, but I do this so cleverly that the sin appears to be an act of virtue; thus, other infidels, unable to learn from the example, continue to sink into the abyss.³²

Judging by his style, this evil spirit must be Jewish. His syncopated rhythm, archaic diction (dos for “that” instead of az), and especially the learned Hebraic vocabulary (mekatreg, derekh-hateve, poyshim, shoel-takhtis) betray a good few years spent in the Celestial Yeshiva. All this book learning and pious moralizing is, of course, itself betrayed in the name of values quite at variance with rabbinic Judaism. But which values?

Perhaps the evil spirit can claim Goethe's Mephistopheles—master thinker and talker—as a distant relative. The evil spirit, whose diary we are supposedly reading, might very well be a closet romantic representing articulation, detached intelligence.³³ By dominating the story, he forces us to identify with the criminal and his experience, and each of Bashevis' protagonists does enter into a Faustian bargain with the devil. Reb Nathan Juzefover succumbs first to the pleasures of the flesh, in the person of his venal servant Shifra Zirel, then to the mercy of his divorced wife Roise Temerl, with whom he lives in sin (“The Unseen”). Zeidel Cohen agrees to convert to Christianity in order to achieve a position of power in the church hierarchy (“Zeidlus the Pope”). At the moment of death, each man experiences an epiphany, much as one would expect from satanic heroes who achieve an extraordinary visual perspective for the price of their moral rebellion. But if these stories were written to celebrate human choice and individual experience, the Nathans and Zeidels would hardly be described, from the opening lines, as mere pawns in the devil's game. The romantics would scarcely have recognized the yeytser-hore or his victims as their own.

Because the evil spirit performs his labors “so cleverly that the sin appears to be an act of virtue,” victims are made to believe that they are acting out of free will. But where the devil reigns, moral choice and self-development are illusory; compassion, beauty, intellect—like every human trait—can be made to serve evil as well as good. Especially the intellect, for the ability to rationalize one's behavior is the beginning of sin. The evil spirit works patiently behind the scenes until a person confronts an object of desire. Then, as the human intellect works overtime, concocting elaborate schemes of self-justification (with each side marshaling precedents from the Holy Book), the devil has the victim in his net.

The evil spirit's godfather is sooner Freud than Faust. True to classical Freudian theory, the devil plays both the id, which “induce[s] people to sin,” and the superego, which “will then ascend to Heaven to accuse them.” Like the seasoned psychoanalyst who prefers the serious cases, the evil spirit saves the truly extravagant sinners for his gedenkbukh (diary). A corpulent husband and wife completely devoted to pleasures of the bathhouse are obvious favorites (“The Unseen”). But so too is a bald recluse, with pointed skull, reddish eyelids and a pair of yellow, melancholy eyes, a crooked nose, the hands and feet of a woman, though such a one would surely seem immune from the satanic virus (“Zeidlus the Pope”). Either way the ego sinks into the abyss and “other infidels [are] unable to learn from the example” because each individual will succumb to his own particular passion. For the intrepid scientist whose diary this is, the uncharted depths of human pathology have much more to offer than the heady, well-traveled reaches of the soul.

The evil spirit reigns supreme because he alone knows the difference between good and evil, health and perversion. And the way we know that he knows is through his superidiomatic and extremely witty speech. “Der yid hot ale yorn oysek geven in der mitsve fun Ushmartem Es Nafshoyseykhem,” he writes of Nathan Juzefover, “dehayne: er hot gegesn, getrunken un zikh gelozt voylgeyn” (This Jew dedicated his whole life to the commandment And you shall keep your Souls, i.e, he ate, drank, and made merry; Y 206). As for Roise Temerl, “di ishe aleyn hot oykh nisht geleygt hintern oyer … man-un-vayb hobn, a ponim, gehaltn az kayen iz nisht hevel” (The good woman herself did not merely make airs about her appetites … husband and wife were apparently of one mind, that self-indulgence was nothing to sneeze at; Y 207). That last is particularly pithy, irreverent, and untranslatable. “Cain is not Abel” is a bilingual pun which understands Kayin/Cain as kayen, to chew, and Hevel/Abel as “vanity” (as in hevel havolim, vanity of vanities). So even before the story begins, Nathan and Roise Temerl are undercut by a parodic style that plays Scripture, idiom, and proverb against a pair of none-too-learned hedonists. “Mit loshn-koydesh iz er nisht geven shove-beshove” (he [Nathan] was frankly at odds with the holy tongue) the devil adds with a showy display of Hebraic style. While the two lovebirds may waver between hedonism and strict adherence to Judaic law, the devil telling the story is as firmly rooted in yidishkayt as is the Yiddish he so cleverly speaks.

Nathan and Roise are fairly easy prey, and the sin of adultery is all in a day's work. The devil's finest hour comes when he faces off against Reb Zeidel Cohen, “the greatest scholar in the whole province of Lublin,” because here is room for lengthy intellectual debate and the stakes are nothing less than faith and apostasy.³⁴ To best so formidable an opponent, the devil dons the mask of a maskil, and to undermine Zeidel's faith he unleashes a litany heard many times before: Jewish law is nothing but hairsplitting, its language deliberately corrupted to keep the people ignorant; Jewish majesty has been stripped of its glory by sniveling rabbis who accept the inferior status foisted on them by the Christian world. Only temporal power is real, and only the gentiles possess it. Waxing more philosophical still, the devil portrays a supremely indifferent God, who has no special claim on His people Israel and could care less about the punctilious observance of His laws. “Is there no reward or punishment?” Zeidel finally asks in amazement. “No,” comes the devil's reply.

Where the deity is supremely indifferent, man can be omnipotent, says the devil, provided the divine pretender abandons Judaism for Christianity. “Since their God is a man, a man can be a god to them … They don't care what else a man is: if he is great, they idolize him” (Y 277-278, E 345). Without moral accountability, without a personal God, and in a world where God and gets (idol) are one and the same, religious faith itself is a logical absurdity. The only thing left is to take what you can get. Christianity is idolatry, but it can get you a ticket to power.

Master cynic and polemicist, the devil is having a field day. With an eye to the future, he can see that the church of today is the Enlightenment dream of tomorrow. Trading God for man is the same as aping the gentiles for access to power and privilege. How better to expose these goals as illusory and self-destructive, how better to launch an attack on the heresy of secular humanism, than through the mouth of a devil? This walking encyclopedia of Jewish self-deception, however, is also a talking thesaurus of Jewish hostility toward the values of a secular world. The Yiddish he speaks, which insists on dissociating itself from everything Christian, cuts to the heart of Bashevis' argument that Yiddish will either be an expression of Jewishness or nothing at all.³⁵

Within Yiddish itself there had come into being what Max Weinreich termed lehavdl-loshn, a built-in, double vocabulary to distinguish or differentiate the Jewish from the Christian realm. Since, from the Jewish point of view, what is “ours” is automatically better than what is “theirs,” the words that signify their world are loaded with pejorative meaning. More than a motley of ethnic slurs, of the kind that Philip Roth and other American satirists later came to exploit, this is a linguistic structure that serves to insulate the Jews even as they live and work among Christians. Bashevis' storytellers all employ this denigrative language, none more fully than the devil and nowhere with greater relish than in “Zeidlus the Pope.”³⁶

Zeidel succumbs to the devil's argument and is accepted into the church as Benedictus Janovsky. Reaching for the top, he decides to write the definitive anti-Talmudic tract. The devil-narrator waxes eloquent over Zeidel's scholarly endeavors (the key phrases are given in italics):

Far eyn vegs hot Zeydl zikh farnumen tsu gefinen naye rayes fun tanakh, az di neviim hobn kloymersht foroysgezen Yeyshus kumen un zayn mise-meshune un zayn tkhies-hameysim. Er hot oykh gevolt aroysdringen dem kristlekhn das al-pi khokhmes-halogik, astronomye, un khokhmes-hateve. Zeydl's khiber hot gezolt vern, lehavdl, a goyisher yad-khazoke, a shrift, vos zol Zeydlen avektrogn fun Yonev glaykh in Vatikan.

(Y 281)

At the same time, Zeidel undertook to find fresh proofs in the Bible that the prophets had foreseen Jesus' birth, martyrdom, and resurrection; and to discover corroborative evidence for the Christian religion in logic, astronomy, and natural science. Zeidel's treatise would be for the Christians what Maimonides' The Strong Hand was for Judaism—and it would carry its author from Janov directly to the Vatican.

(E 349)

But just now Zeidel undergoes a crisis of faith:

Zeydl hot ongehoybn aynzen, az bay di areylim iz gornisht azoy voyl. Di galokhim hobn mer in zinen dos gold vi dem opgot. Di prediker in di boteytume zenen ful mit ameratses. Psukim fun tanakh in dem bris-khadoshe vern gefelsht un farkriplt. Fil galokhim konen nisht keyn vort latayn. Oykh zeyer poylish loshn iz ful mit grayzn.

(Y 282)

Zeidel began to realize that even among the gentiles things were far from perfect. The clergy cared more for gold than for their God. Their sermons were full of errors. [They falsified and misquoted verses from the Bible and the New Testament.] Most of the priests did not know Latin, but even in Polish their quotations were incorrect.

(E 349)

The storyteller is unmoved by Zeidel's fate. What is there to be tempted by if, as the devil knows but as Zeidel has presumably forgotten, all the gentiles are nothing but areylim, heathens, their houses of prayer are really boteytume, or houses of filth, the crucifixion was a mise-meshune, a grotesque and violent death, and above all that their God is but an opgot, an idol? Careful not to mention the sacred and profane in the same breath without a verbal separation between them, the devil can only compare Zeidel's treatise, written in Latin, to a goyisher (goyish, gentile) version of Maimonides' The Strong Hand, and that only after inserting the word lehavdl, to differentiate. Elsewhere he refuses even to utter the name of Jesus and speaks instead of the shikuts meshoymem, the “appalling abomination” mentioned at the end of the book of Daniel (Y 282). From first to last, in form and substance, the devil's verbal aggression against what is “theirs” leaves no doubt that he will have no truck whatever with the falsehood and corruption to which he tempts the ascetic and scholarly Zeidel.

“Alienated from all traditions and conventions, the romantic hero is a suitable agent of experience.”³⁷ By this well-worn critical standard, Zeidel should be in for something really big. In his fanatical pursuit of absolute knowledge, he ceases to believe in truth or falsehood of any persuasion. But once baptized, there is no going back. Cut off from both Judaism and Christianity, he goes blind and becomes a beggar. He comes to acknowledge the futility of his quest and discovers that the reward of intellectualism is illusion. Alienated from without and from within, Zeidel experiences an epiphany:

Suddenly I, the Tempter, materialized. Although blind he saw me. “Zeidel,” I said, “prepare yourself. The last hour has come.”

“Is it you, Satan, Angel of Death?” Zeidel exclaimed joyously.

“Yes, Zeidel,” I replied. “I have come for you. And it won't help you to repent or confess, so don't try.”

“Where are you taking me?” he asked.

“Straight to Gehenna.”

“If there is a Gehenna, there is also a God,” Zeidel said, his lips trembling.

“That proves nothing,” I retorted.

“Yes it does,” he said. “If Hell exists, everything exists. If you are real, He is real. Now take me to where I belong. I am ready.”

(Y 287, E 352-353)

As the hero of romantic fiction, Zeidel the blind beggar would be considered a reliable witness. But the truths revealed to him at the moment of death repudiate the credos of modernity—and of romanticism. Man is an effect, not a cause, of creation, and despite his efforts to rule the world through reason alone, there is after all a Judge and a Judgment. There was never any contest between ours (the worship of one God) and theirs (the adoration of idols). The man of true learning would never be seduced by Christianity, by the allure of Enlightenment, for both are the pursuit of vanity. Conversion is a victory for the forces of evil, denying the crucial separation between the nature of God and the nature of man. Zeidel's joyous acceptance of the torments of hell signify an ironic victory over the powers of darkness, for Israel will never be destroyed so long as Israel bows before its creator.

“If God does not exist,” cries Kirlov in Dostoevsky's Possessed, “then I am God!” Bashevis became a storyteller so that he could address these metaphysical questions all over again—and answer them from the other side of reality. Not since Gogol brought the devil back to roost in a Ukrainian hamlet and Dostoevsky exposed man's demonic drive to depose the Almighty had modern literature seen as malevolent and powerful a force as the yeytser-hore. Not since Rabbi Nahman had the contest between faith and reason been waged for such high stakes. The return of Satan—as narrator and prime mover—signaled a return to a time just prior to the flood, when the fate of creation hung in the balance. It was the year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Three, when evil of metaphysical proportions was unleashed on the Jews by nations that professed to be Christian. Should life on earth continue, there would have to be a metaphysical counterweight to evil. “If you are real,” cries Zeidel to the devil, “then He is real!” Over Kant and Nietzsche, Zeidel reaches back to reclaim the negative theology of Lurianic Kabbalah.

Storytelling also meant a return to a world of piety, densely Jewish in both style and substance. The storyteller's fierce polemic with Christianity covered an attack on other Jewish heresies, the most recent of which, just east of the Polish-Soviet border, saw a host of Jewish commissars trying desperately and disastrously to be frimer farn poyps, more Catholic than the pope. Bashevis had one response to these yeshiva students turned masters of dialectical materialism: he sent them all to hell.

But there was more. A good story seduced the reader by recalling other stories of the same kind. Had not the story of a Jewish pope, the kidnapped son of the rabbi of Mayence (some say of Frankfurt) been recounted by Isaac Meir Dik and before that still, in the medieval Mayse-bukh? Bashevis retold the story but with a radical twist. He did not preach passive resignation to a miserable lot of ghetto Jews, nor did he seek, conversely, a reconciliation of Jews to a secular, enlightened world. Instead, the setting of “Zeidlus the Pope” was moved from Germany to Janów, a “dump in the sticks among Jews,” to clinch Bashevis' case against the grandiose fantasy of enlightenment and the destructive secular aspiration of Jews. In Janów there was no contest to begin with. In the cosmopolitan centers of Europe one might well be swayed by the Christian disdain for the Jews, and one might be seduced by the power and glory of the church. In Janów, the whole notion of converting or defecting was a bad joke, a mean trick played by the devil.³⁸

Equally familiar is the story's farcical ending. Two mocking imps stand at the threshold of Gehenna, “half-fire and half-pitch, each with a three-cornered hat on his head, a whipping rod on his loins. They burst out laughing. ‘Here comes Zeidlus the First,’ one said to the other, ‘the yeshiva boy who wanted to become pope.’ Der yeshive-boker, vos hot gevolt vern an apifyor” (Y 286, E 353). It was a scene every modern Yiddish reader knew, for the same satanic entourage had once given Peretz's Monish the same darkly comic welcome.

When Zeidel is first introduced to the reader, the devil describes him as the greatest Talmud scholar in all of Poland, using the same hyperbolic phrases as Peretz's balladeer.³⁹ As surely as they were literary twins, however, Zeidel was just as surely a genetic mutation, for Monish was vital, handsome, and seductive, a hero worthy of romantic ballad, while Zeidel belonged in Madame Toussaud's. Peretz, the modernist, used the legend of Faust to mock the whole idea of virtue and sin in a nonheroic age. Yitskhok Bashevis returned to the scene of the crime—a small town in old Poland—and made Zeidel impossibly grotesque in order to parody the master.

Ever the secular humanist, Peretz staged the struggle between good and evil as a contest between equal adversaries. Even as he cut the devil down to human size, making him something of a skeptic, Peretz endowed his men and women with the intellectual and moral capacities to exercise free will. Bashevis launched his rebuttal in the same court of legendary justice, then raised the ante by putting knowledge and intellect themselves on the dock. Beginning with Rechele in Satan in Goray, all of Bashevis' protagonists came with a reading list. Nathan Juzefover may rarely have exercised his brain, but at least he knew about the River of Fire from reading the Nakhlas tsvi (Inheritance of the Deer), a Yiddish ethical tract. His wife, Roise Temerl, in a moment of indecision was reminded of a Yiddish storybook “where a [Christian] landowner, whose wife had eloped with a bear tamer, later forgave her and took her back to his manor.” Zeidel's bibliography was prodigious, as befitted an intellectual hero. Yet Zeidel's learning (like Rechele's) did not strengthen his bond to society, community, or God. Nobody delighted in the sound of Zeidel's voice, as they did when Monish was hard at work on some tractate. Learning intensified isolation; it set a Jew apart from communal norms and ultimately became an instrument of the devil.⁴⁰

That is because, in learning, there is none to match the devil. More steeped in the sacred texts than even the greatest sages in Poland, the devil could cite chapter and verse to buttress his satanic designs. “Why not?” he says to Nathan Juzefover whose lust for the servant girl seems to leave him no recourse but to divorce his wife.

Did not Abraham drive his bondwoman, Hagar, into the wilderness, with nothing but a bottle of water, because he preferred Sarah? And later, did he not take Keturah and have six sons with her? Did not Moses, the teacher of all Jews, take, in addition to Zipporah, another wife from the land of Kush; and when Miriam, his sister, spoke against him, did she not become leprous?

(Y 219, E 120-121)

The Devil is never at a loss to find the scriptural or rabbinic precedent to fit the crime, as when he works Zeidel over with this litany:

You know the Jews have never honored their leaders: They grumbled about Moses; rebelled against Samuel; threw Jeremiah into a ditch; and murdered Zacharias. The Chosen People hate greatness. In a great man they sense a rival to the Holy One, blessed be He, so they love only the petty and mediocre.

(Y 277, E 345)

A devil's-eye view of civilization sees a very thin line between the sacred and profane. Not only does learning not protect a person from sin; the hubris born of learning is the hardest sin to extirpate. How easily the acquisition of knowledge becomes an end in itself, a license to blaspheme, to fancy oneself a god. The learned devil deludes man into believing that evil is a problem of human proportions when the humanist fallacy (Bashevis intimates) is itself the root of all evil.

The use of perverted precedent is not merely part of a devilish design to provoke victims into crossing the line between sacred and profane. Nor is it a way of playing out the theme of seduction using only the materials of Jewish tradition. The devil's demonic prooftexts also give voice to Bashevis' own protest against heaven.

There is something unnerving about so much gratuitous evil in these stories of The Devil's Diary. “Two Corpses Go Dancing” (1943) and “From the Diary of One Not Born” (1943) are relentless catalogues of innocent folk destroyed by satanic powers.⁴¹ There is something heretical, Manichean, about a devil invested with such boundless energy to do evil, who starts his story off by boasting: “It is well known that I love to arrange strange marriages, delighting in such mismatings as an old man with a young girl, an unattractive widow with a youth in his prime, a cripple with a great beauty, a cantor with a deaf woman, a mute with a braggart.”⁴² Accountable to nothing but his own perverse whims, and knowing the outcome beforehand, the devil is lord and master. The problem posed by The Devil's Diary, as Ruth Wisse so aptly puts it, is not the problem of man's free will but God's.⁴³

The devil alone is free because he stands for the author. And that author is angry. As the devil is free to blaspheme against God, His Torah, and His People, so the devil, master storyteller that he is, blasphemes at will against all who preceded him, in particular those storytellers who misled the flock with false hopes and panaceas. A Yiddish devil writing in 1943 can easily identify the chief offender—at that moment the most popular Yiddish writer in the world, Sholem Asch (1880-1957).

The attack against Asch began with Satan in Goray. One compelling reason for choosing the period of the Cossack revolts of 1648-49 was that Sholem Asch had already trodden that path, in Kiddush Hashem (1919). Using the Chmielnitsky massacres as a fictional cloak for the civil war raging in the Ukraine, Asch ended his historical saga on a note of equivocal bitokhn, faith in the future. Bashevis took the notion of messianic faith within the same historical setting and turned it into a horrifying vision of apocalypse.⁴⁴

Bashevis followed that a decade later with “The Destruction of Kreshev” (Kreszew; 1943). By now Asch had won the hearts of Yiddish readers for his paeans to the brotherhood of Christians and Jews in the natural Polish landscape. Thus “Kola Street” (1905-06) begins with a long and lush description of a triangular area on the western tip of Mazowsze, which includes Kutno, Zychlin, Gostynin, Gombin, “and a number of smaller towns.” Possessing none of the mystery or music of the neighboring province, its fields are “flat and monotonous … and the peasant who cultivates them is as plain as the potatoes they yield.” Similarly, “the Jew native to this region partakes more of the flavor of wheat and of apples than of the synagogue and the ritual bath.”⁴⁵ Not to be outdone, the primeval snake, the Evil One, also begins by situating his story within the differentiated landscape of Mother Poland:

Kreshev is about as large as one of the smallest letters in the smallest prayer books. On two sides of the town there is a thick pine forest and on the third the river San. The peasants in the neighboring villages are poorer and more isolated than any others in the Lublin district and the fields are the most barren … And finally, so that the peasants shall never be rid of their wretchedness, I have instilled in them a burning faith. In that part of the country there is a church in every other village, a shrine at every tenth house.

(Y 194, E 94)

There follow some nasty comments aimed at the Catholic faith. In response to Asch's ecumenical fantasies, moreover, the devil recounts more dramatic instances of Jewish-Christian rapprochement: young peasant women are routinely seduced by Jewish peddlers in the barn, “so it is not entirely surprising that here and there among the flaxen-haired children one comes across a curly-haired, blacked-eyed imp with a hooked nose.” Even the plotlines turn in on one another. Kreshev's Leybl Shmayser (inexplicably translated by Gottlieb and Flaum as “Mendel the Coachman”), is a carbon copy of Notte Zychliner: both strapping young men chase pigeons and shiksas. Notte, with his noble-savage passions, provokes a pogrom in Kola Street, which only subsides when his pigeons are sacrificed on the communal altar. In Kreshev, however, anarchic passions burst out not from the deviant sidelines of shtetl society but from its spiritual center: from Shloimele, the Talmud scholar and kabbalist. Because these passions are hidden behind the false messianism of Shabbetai Zvi, they lead to the heroine's death and the destruction of Kreshev.

Many parodic strands run through the demonic fictions of Yitskhok Bashevis. They reveal an author deeply enmeshed in the fabric of modern Yiddish writing, who manages to extricate himself by beating the Yiddish masters at their own game: the work of creative betrayal. Manifestoes alone—which in any event he stopped writing after 1943—would not suffice to shake the ideological foundations of Yiddish secularism. In the guise of a demonic storyteller, and by parodying stories heard many times before, Bashevis succeeded in subverting the subversion. Where Peretz and Asch had raided the shtetl past for parables of individual action and self-transcendence, Bashevis revisited the same sites to strike a final blow at the redemptive schemes that gave rise to modern Yiddish literature in the first place.

Waging holy war was Bashevis' way of internalizing the war raging elsewhere. Yet demonic storytelling, the secular equivalent of the hellfire sermon, was only the Other Side, the Sitra aḥra, of Bashevis' restorative program in the wake of the Holocaust. Laying his demons to rest, if only for a while and only in his role as storyteller, Bashevis produced three works in rapid succession that were breathtaking in their humanity: “The Spinoza of Market Street” (1944), “Gimpel the Fool” (1945), and “The Little Shoemakers” (1945). Here, instead of using his genius to parody the work of others, Bashevis reused his own plots, characters, and descriptive methods for good instead of evil.⁴⁶

Gimpel the Fool and Zeidlus the Pope: both are loners whose mental curriculum isolates them morally, then physically, then metaphysically. Gimpel's mental faculties are protected by his status as an orphan, by his foolishness, by being the butt of Frampol's laughter, and by the repetition of the ordeal. His desire for love, albeit for Elke, the town whore, and his compassion for the children, albeit not his own, protect him from doing wrong and from succumbing to the temptation of the devil. To complete his isolation, after the death of Elke, Gimpel goes into exile, becomes a wandering sage and storyteller, and finally arrives at a statement of otherworldly faith. These ascending levels of isolation are the price one pays for achieving goodness in so cruel a world as Gimpel's. Yet his appellation leaves no doubt that Bashevis meant the story not to parody but to rehabilitate the life of simple faith as a moral possibility. For the genealogy of the tam, Gimpel's Yiddish nickname, connects him with the biblical Jacob and Job, with the third of the four sons of the Passover Haggadah, and especially with Nahman of Bratslav's “Tale of the Hakham and the Tam.” The last is the closest to Bashevis' hero, for Gimpel achieves goodness in his personal life by ignoring, then willfully rejecting, the evil and skepticism around him. But unlike Reb Nahman, Bashevis does not hold out hope for global redemption. The most one can hope for is love between a man and a woman, which in turn is the conduit for one's love of God. Both I/Thou relationships require a leap of faith—and the renunciation of worldly pursuits. So too for “The Spinoza of Market Street.”⁴⁷

Jewish storytelling in the midst of the Holocaust was a form of triage in which the storyteller's most valuable resource became the Hebrew Bible. It restored for the Jews the elemental vocabulary of good and evil, redemption and destruction. It was also the greatest family saga of them all. Writing in the European tradition, Bashevis chronicled the rise and fall of The Family Moskat (1945-50), doomed along with the great city of Warsaw and the multitudinous Jews of Poland. As a storyteller Bashevis could only rescue “The Little Shoemakers,” a modest and industrious shtetl family, and bring them to the haven of America.⁴⁸ Both novel and story were concerned with the covenantal meaning of Jewish history. In one, the patriarch, his sons, his private secretary, and most of all his son-in-law succumb to their anarchic passions. Not so the shoemakers, who behave more like a tribe than a family, guided by Abba, their fecund and faithful patriarch. Nothing can break his spirit: not the gradual collapse of his ancestral home or the defection of Gimpel, the educated son, and the emigration of the others; not even the Nazi apocalypse. For Abba is an archetype, his life a replay of the biblical past. He is Moses and Jonah, crossing the perilous sea. He is Jacob, finally reunited with his sons in Egypt. Defying the rules of realism, and working against the centrifugal forces of history, Abba is not supplanted by his sons. It is Abba, in New Jersey of all places, who brings the generations back together, cobbling the old-fashioned way and singing the family hymn.

Playing the wandering sage, Bashevis threw his wit, his knowledge, his ear for the music of Yiddish into restoring however many fictional contexts he could wherein to cultivate the lost art of Yiddish storytelling. Like Peretz and Sholem Aleichem before him, he created the illusion of live speech by turning to the monologue, and like them he decentered the world of tradition by favoring outcasts, deviants, children, and women—all within a linguistic setting that could not have been more Yiddish. Gimpel, the saintly fool, narrates his life's story in a flophouse to a melange of old men. Here he feels quite at ease recalling how he was cuckolded by his wife, ridiculed by all, and how the most heroic act of his life was not to urinate into the dough for the next day's bread. His statement of faith in the world to come over cynicism in this world was certainly not lost on his immediate audience. A year later, in “The Wife Killer” (1945), Bashevis restored the concept of a bobe-mayse, an old wife's tale, to its literal meaning: he created Matl, surrounded by a group of old women, whom she held in the palm of her hand with a wealth of local traditions, superstitions, and pious formulas designed to titillate even as they displayed the storyteller's impeccable modesty.⁴⁹

“Did I hear you say a husband killer? Bahit un bashiremt zol men vern, May one be spared and protected. Nisht do gedakht, nisht kegn nakht gedakht, nisht far keyn yidisher tokhter gedakht, May it never happen here, never toward nightfall, and never happen to a daughter in Israel; s'zol oysgeyn tsu sonims kep un tsu zeyer layb un lebn, may such things happen to our enemies, to their lives and livers.” A woman's world, more earthbound than a man's, centered on such things as the fatal attraction of one sex for the other. Why would any woman want to marry the likes of Pelte, that ugly misanthrope from the town of Turbyn, who kept his hoarded wealth in a formidable oak chest built to outlast all disasters; a man who became more isolated with each wife he buried? Perhaps because the whole story bore out the truth of what the rabbi had said at the eulogy for wife number three: “‘Zimen shkhoyrim umotso levonim, He ordered black and got white.’ In the Gemara [Beitza 10b] this is about a man ordering pigeons, but the rabbi—peace be upon him—made it mean wedding garments and burial shrouds” (Y 60, E 43). This is another way of saying that these horrible reversals of fate were all from above. “When God wants to punish someone,” Matl reminds her listeners, “He deprives him of reason.” In God's inscrutable universe, it is Zlateh the Bitch, the husband killer, the katlonis mentioned in the story's opening, who finally gives Pelte a run for his money—or is it she who gets her just desserts by trying to defeat the infamous wife killer? Either way the battle of the sexes turned logic on its head and left the oaken chests broken and abandoned. “The Wife Killer had outlived everything,” says Matl at the end of her long and artful tale, “his wives, his enemies, his money, his property, his generation. All that was left of him—may God forgive me for saying so—was a heap of dust.”

Once again, as in the days of Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish storytelling became a communal speech act (reserved for the Yiddish reader alone, as it happens, because Matl's rhetorical asides to her listening audience are elided in English translation). As Sholem Aleichem played what was being narrated—a tale of utter dissolution—against the frenetic manner in which it was narrated, so too did Bashevis. Lascivious tales about outsiders and deviants were an obvious way to confer sanction upon the group (“May such things happen to our enemies”), which seemingly made a perfect fit between the what and the how. Yet what kind of survival tactic were the Matls and Gimpels preaching if every tale is a tale of extreme isolation and if all the proverbs and maxims add up to the same relentless message: fate and inscrutable forces rule all of human destiny.

In the mid-1960s Bashevis' “Aunt Yentl” picked up where Matl left off, with her own richly idiomatic style and a repertory even more geared for female consumption. Bashevis opened the monologue into a storytelling round by returning to the normative realm of the study house. Each of the men in “Three Tales” (1964) comes from a different stratum of shtetl society: Zalmen the Glazier from the artisan class, Levi-Yitskhok Amshinover from the merchant class, and Meyer Tumtum (“Eunuch”) from the mystically bent intellectual class. As one ascends the social ladder, each storyteller draws from his particular world to produce an even taller tale than the one just heard. Finally, in the mid-seventies, Bashevis pulled Bendet Daddy out of retirement, the man from Bilgoraj whose daughters ran a whore house on the outskirts of town. Though he and his buddies also frequented the study house, it was for want of a tavern and after the learned regulars had left. Bendet recounted the racy exploits of the old Polish nobility with a style as aggressively anti-Christian as the yeytser-hore's.⁵⁰

Whether it is a recluse quoting from the Talmud and Zohar or Aunt Yentl and Bendet Daddy peppering their speech with Polish proverbs—regardless of a person's background, he or she will cite chapter and verse to deny the exercise of free will. The communal medium of storytelling is the message insofar as the community insists on a single standard of morality, maintains an absolute distinction between ours and theirs, and sees humans as passive victims of their fate. Yet the stories play with fire. They tell of fools, messianists, and deviants of every stripe and social class, most of whom are crushed in their attempt to break free and a few of whom manage to save their souls by finding love or by going into permanent exile. The proverb-quoting folk extol passivity even as they vivify the anarchy and temptation that threaten to turn everything upside down.⁵¹

In this, as in other respects, the devil is the model storyteller, for he has read more, seen more, and remembers more than any other person living or dead, and he harbors no illusions about the perfectibility of man. His sententiousness hearkens back to the beginnings of modern Yiddish storytelling—to a time when Yiddish was being used for satiric ends and when the arch-satirist was the Bible-quoting, all-knowing, and peripatetic Mendele the Bookpeddler. In much the same way as Mendele progressed, in the course of the late nineteenth century, from bystander and editor to author and protagonist, so Bashevis' devil assumes ever greater narrative responsibilities during the late 1950s. His monologues become theatrical performances, in which a familiar plot provides the backdrop for his verbal pyrotechnics, delivered in the style of Jewish culture's original satirist, the ever-popular badkhn at the wedding.

The plots are a foregone conclusion: “For everything hidden must be revealed, every secret longs to be disclosed, each love yearns to be betrayed, everything sacred must be desecrated. Heaven and earth conspire that all good beginnings should come to a bad end.”⁵² So says the devil in his artful and rhythmic monologue about “The Mirror” (1956), lifted straight out of Peretz's Stories in the Folk Vein. Zirel, like the heroine of Peretz's “A Passion for Clothes” (1904), is wealthy and well educated. They both succumb to earthly pleasures, as the name Zirel, “ornament,” suggests. But there is no contest at all in the devil's version of things, for Zirel is doomed the moment she looks into the mirror—symbol of her vanity—and no one can resist so likeable a character as the devil. His will is their command. To rouse a woman's pity, he makes up a sad story, casting himself in the role of outcast. To excite her, he recites a litany of licentiousness: “Like the mule I am the last of a line. But this does not blunt my desire. I lie only with married women, for good actions are my sins; my prayers are blasphemies; spite is my bread; arrogance, my wine; pride, the marrow of my bones. There is only one other thing I can do besides chatter” (Y 4, E 60). To while away his own time, between one appearance and the next, he recapitulates this credo in rhyme:

Ober vos iz Khave on a shlang? Vos iz bsomim on geshtank? Vos iz zun on a shotn? Un vos iz got on a sotn?

(Y 5)

But what is Eve without a serpent? What are spices without a stench? What is the sun without a shadow? And what is God without a devil?

Zirel's whole seduction, in fact, is just a brief distraction from the devil's stream of consciousness, as he flits back and forth between prophecy and profanity. Once he has her in his net, poor Zirel doesn't get a word in edgewise. Only then does the curtain go up on the devil as he recites bawdier rhymes than any badkhn dared to mouth, and poses theological questions so densely allusive that they are reserved for the Yiddish audience alone:

Tut di kdushe mit der tume fekhtn? Vet got dem sotn shekhtn? Oder iz Samoel gerekht, az er iz der hekht fun ale hekht? Vos veyst a shedl ver s'firt s'redl?

(Y 10)

Do the sacred and profane fight it out? Will God deliver the devil a rout? Or is Samael right after all, that he's the belle of the ball? What does a petty demon know about who's running the show?

Can it be that the world is only matter, the devil probes on, created without rhyme or reason? Or is there a prime mover at one end of creation and a messiah at the other? “Efsher vet der ish-tamim fort kumen tsu a takhlis be‘akhris hayomim? Lesate zenen mir balebatim. Perhaps the man of faith will be vindicated in the End of Days? Meanwhile, at any rate, we are still the ones at the gate.” The devil loves speaking in rhymes; he's never feistier than when sparring on the creator's own turf.⁵³

Zeidel's answer to the devil is Bashevis' answer to himself: there can be no demonic art without a God. Once the parameters of good and evil fall away, there is no use for tales of seduction. Once Yiddish is divorced from yidishkayt, there is no longer a way to sustain the creative tension between the what and the how. There has to be someone, somewhere, still rooted in the law and lore of the past, struggling with meaning and blasphemy. And that someone is the Yiddish writer in American exile, disguised as a demon-storyteller, and most poignantly portrayed in Mayse Tishevits (1959).⁵⁴

Why Tishevits (the same place Peretz visited on his statistical mission)? Because back in 1943 Bashevis argued that “each Polish shtetl, each Jewish street, had its specific character,” but that his colleagues had woefully neglected this rich imaginative realm. In Tishevits, for example, there had lived and died Messiah ben Joseph.⁵⁵ (This local tradition is borne out by the memoirs and memories of former inhabitants.⁵⁶) Bashevis filed the data away for a quarter century, until he was ready to exploit Tishevits for its messianic potential.

Why “Mayse Tishevits”? Because mayse followed by a place name is the storyteller's code word for a martyrological tale, as in Mayse Uman of the eighteenth century. What better way to respond to the latest Jewish catastrophe, the Holocaust, than through the example of martyrologies past? Why a demonic monologue, when the issues at hand were redemption and destruction? Precisely for that reason, the demonic monologue having become the storyteller's forum for the questions that really matter.

I, a demon, bear witness that there are no more demons left. Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced? I am the last of the persuaders. I board in an attic in Tishevitz and draw my sustenance from a Yiddish storybook, a leftover from the days before the great catastrophe.

(Y 12, E 300)

Instead of allowing the demon to roam free, as in the previous tales, he is stuck in this domestic setting because once upon a time, in Bilgoraj, Itchele Singer had sat in his grandfather's attic reading forbidden books, and now, as the aging writer looks back on his career, he wonders how much longer and to what end he might continue drawing sustenance from the severed past. Especially since these “Yiddish storybooks” (the Yiddish secular heritage) were “pablum and duck milk,” products of a bankrupt Enlightenment ideology.

Tales of temptation are the stuff of these newfangled books, like Peretz's story of how a skeptical devil targets the aging rabbi of Chelm to prove the miracle of the righteous man. Because the legendary victim was endowed with free will and grounded in Jewish law, the contest was fair enough, but the rabbi of Chelm failed the ultimate test, failing to aspire beyond a pre-Sabbath pinch of snuff. That was long ago, before the great catastrophe. Since then, and once again, evil has become a metaphysical problem, a force so pervasive that even the demons cannot understand or control it. “It has reached a point where people want to sin beyond their capacities,” says the demon-narrator to a fellow imp. “They martyr themselves for the most trivial of sins” (Y 14, E 302). Thus the choice of the young rabbi of Tishevits is accidental, and the evil touches him gratuitously, lacking moral significance; and the critical third test, the climax of every sacred tale, never happens because the Germans come and murder the Jews of Tishevits and all the other Jews of Poland, leaving only one demon-survivor.⁵⁷

Peretz's Chelm story is a spoof on the legend of Joseph della Reina, who tried to force the hand of God but was tricked by Samael into offering the devil a pinch of snuff. Bashevis' demonic monologue is an indictment of Peretz and all like-minded humanists who believed that redemption could be wrought by human hands. Of these writers the demon says: “They know all our tricks—mockery, piety. They have a hundred reasons why a rat must be kosher. All that they want to do is to redeem the world” (Y 14, E 302-303). And so Tishevits, birthplace of the false messiah, was a fitting place for the last temptation of the just man—and a fitting refuge for the last Yiddish storyteller, who ended his truncated tale with a children's ditty on the letters of the alphabet.⁵⁸

For the demon, time stands still, allowing him to act the role of tempter in a Yiddish-speaking shtetl and to step outside time, there to question the very tale he has just told. In that attic he has everything a storyteller can want: a legendary landscape complete with local messiahs; a library of old storybooks; the solitude to test the limits of his own parodic art and stylized language. Of course no attic can constrain him, because the jester is just now warming up to the infinite possibilities of mixing this world and the next, past and present, demons and humans.

If the demon can pass as a badkhn, why not the reverse? Elkhonon, the amateur badkhn and lowly teacher's assistant, happens upon Taibele one moonless summer evening as she weaves a tale of demonic love for the benefit of her female friends, and he hatches a plan to bring her story to pass. Enlisting all his verbal skills, he appears in her bedroom and seduces her by whispering satanic nothings into her ear. Eventually, despite her initial dread, she comes to anticipate these biweekly trysts, the first real passion she has ever known, until one day Hurmizah-Elkhonon becomes deathly ill. “There are so many devils,” Taibele cries out in anguish, “let there be one more.”⁵⁹ Though it may be a devilish game, sex has its rewards, and “Taibele and Her Demon” (1962), a remarkably poignant love story, is one of them.

Life is stranger than fiction as demons pale in the face of true desire. The next step for Bashevis is to break down the fiction of fiction altogether. Enter Aaron Greidinger, famous Yiddish author, who speaks extemporaneously about unusual events that happened either to him or were related to him by his readers. Sometimes the result is parodic, as when the writer-narrator, vacationing out of season at Miami Beach, keeps getting his signals crossed with the hidden powers (“Alone,” 1960).⁶⁰ At other times the result is chilling, as when Esther reveals that she has seen Adolf Hitler in “The Cafeteria” (1968).⁶¹

The moment I sit down at a table, they come over. “Hello, Aaron!” they greet me, and we talk about Yiddish literature, the Holocaust, the state of Israel, and often about acquaintances who were eating rice pudding or stewed prunes the last time I was here and are already in their graves. Since I seldom read a paper, I learn this news only later. Each time, I am startled, but at my age one has to be ready for such tidings. The food sticks in the throat; we look at one another in confusion, and our eyes ask mutely, Whose turn is next? Soon we begin to chew again. I am often reminded of a scene in a film about Africa. A lion attacks a herd of zebras and kills one. The frightened zebras run for a while and then they stop and start to graze again. Do they have a choice?

(Y 43-44, E 287)

How quickly the conversation among aging Yiddish speakers turns to the subject of death, a subject that preoccupies the writer himself, though he is a busy man, much in demand. “Almost every day on my walk after lunch, I pass the funeral parlor that waits for us and all our ambitions and illusions,” he tells us. “Sometimes I imagine that the funeral parlor is also a kind of cafeteria where one gets a quick eulogy or Kaddish on the way to eternity.” (Y 45, E 288). It is a most conducive setting for swapping life experiences. Like the study house of old, this cafeteria on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is frequented mostly by men: “old bachelors like myself, would-be writers, retired teachers, some with dubious doctorate titles, a rabbi without a congregation, a painter of Jewish themes, a few translators—all immigrants from Poland or Russia.” This explains why Yiddish is still spoken here, albeit with a generous dose of modern words. Unlike the old study house, however, the clientele is transient. “One of them disappears and I think he is already in the next world; suddenly he reappears and tells me that he has tried to settle in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles.” Sounds innocent enough, a here-today-gone-tomorrow motif, until the barrier between this world and the next begins to break down, revealing a terrifying hole in the fabric of reality.⁶²

The cafeteria, like its clientele, is a survivor of the Holocaust. One day it burns down, and when eventually rebuilt it attracts new customers who drop all pretense to wordliness, revert to speaking “plain Galician Yiddish,” and begin to bare their souls. Now the jungle analogy only alluded to earlier takes on a sinister meaning. These are all people who have experienced life in extremis: depraved sex in the labor camps; friends denouncing each other to the secret police. “To get a bowl of soup or a place to stay,” they tell Aaron, “you had to sell your soul” (Y 55, E 293). Among the returnees is the lone woman in the pack, beautiful Esther, who had earlier confided her disenchantment with politics and the future. “How can we hope when everything ends in death?” she taunts Aaron. “For me, death is the only comfort. What do the dead do? They continue to drink coffee and eat egg cookies? They still read newspapers? A life after death would be nothing but a joke.” Yet this hardened woman is the very one who gains a fleeting glimpse of a demonic realm, while Aaron who preaches that “hope itself is a proof that there is no death” comes to see reality as psychotic, his innermost life as barren—the accumulated papers in his apartment get drier and ever more parched, until one day they too will go up in flames.

The New World is an unstable place. Hotel Row on Miami Beach turns into the primordial staging ground for a contest of the gods, and the friendly neighborhood cafeteria burns down just after hosting a reunion of Hitler and his henchmen. Many times Bashevis uses sudden storms and extremes of nature to signal a correspondence between the human and the cosmic realms. But these new people and places are off the beaten track of Yiddish storytellers. Compared to America, heaven and hell are cosy and familiar.

These new settings for storytelling, which include the offices of the Jewish Daily Forward on the Lower East Side and darkened apartments all ready for a seance on Central Park West, are not exactly a cross-section of America, nor is Aaron Greidinger a died-in-the-wool rationalist. “I have played with the idea that all humanity suffers from schizophrenia,” he muses aloud after hearing the sensational climax to Esther's story. “Along with the atom, the personality of Homo sapiens has been splitting” (Y 66, E 298). Aaron in his own way is as receptive to the hidden forces at work in the universe as Rabbi Pinkhes Menakhem Singer of Krochmalna Street. Both men swear by the prophets of another reality: the son, by Einstein, Freud, and Vaihinger; the father, by Simeon bar Yohai, Isaac Luria, and the Ba‘al Shem Tov. Both go through the motions of their everyday lives as if they were answerable to hidden powers. But after each encounter the father is further dazzled by God's miracles while the son is left to improvise. The best the modern storyteller can do is to end on a note of ambiguity. Did Esther get a glimpse of another reality? Does she or does she not live on after death?⁶³

Yiddish storytelling in the New World becomes an ever more isolated—and isolating—act. The author's dire predictions of 1943 are borne out by his own American tales in which the spoken language no longer reveals a densely layered world of folk belief and religious passion. As a result, Bashevis' American tales (which he begins to write around 1960) lose little in translation because there is nothing much to lose: no cadences; no plethora of idioms, proverbs, maxims; or no use of dialect; no speech patterns unique to women, demons, or underworld types; most significantly, no ingroup code designed to separate the Jews from the gentiles. The syncopated and sententious folk speech of the Old World storytellers is absorbed by the rambling newspaper copy of Yitskhok Warshawski, and before too long—thanks to a stable of translators working overtime to simplify and even bowdlerize the stories and monologues set in eastern Europe—folk speech and news speech become the undifferentiated English of one “I. B. Singer.”

Even the poor devil gets his wings clipped in the process. In his English persona, the devil who inveighed so relentlessly against the church not only has his mouth washed out, but he also becomes something of an expert in Christianity. English is, after all, a language steeped in Christian culture, and so a neutral “string of beads” (shnur patsherkes) easily suggests a rosary; “he lived at the priest's” (baym galekh) becomes “he lived in the priest's rectory”; and the toughly worded Zeidel “no longer wished to bow down before the little Jesus” [zikh bukn tsum yoyizl] is prettified into “nor was he inclined to kneel before an altar.” Made to sound downright ecumenical, this devil is less of an embarrassment to American Jews in the late-fifties (when “Zeidlus the Pope” was first translated), and may in fact represent the mellowing of Bashevis in the face of America's more tolerant brand of Christianity. But it wrecks the story. Once there's no one left to draw the line between truth and falsehood, the devil also becomes a moral relativist and Zeidel's rise and fall become an exercise in absurdity. This makes the story more modernist, and much less Yiddish.⁶⁴

The same devil who presides over the death of Yiddish storytelling also points to an escape from the creative impasse. At the end of Mayse Tishevits, the last demon finds solace by improvising rhymes for the letters of the alphabet, just as Yiddish-speaking children in Warsaw and Bilgoraj were wont to do. The speech of children, with its unselfconscious mix of high and low, exalted truth and satiric insight, could reopen a world of primordial and comical tales. Children, as Singer would later be fond of saying, had no use for psychology, sociology, Kafka, or Finnegans Wake. The aging author whose creative powers were clearly waning, who couldn't help plagiarizing himself, who now used memoir and autobiography to settle old scores, suddenly found his alter ego in the utterly benign figure of “Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus” (1975).⁶⁵

Was it merely for the sake of young readers that Bashevis created in Naftali such a radically simplified version of Gimpel the Fool? Perhaps the storyteller had in mind the earliest purveyors of a truly modern Yiddish literary fare—Mendele and his long-suffering horse. If so, the layering effect of Bashevis' demonic tales is used here to cover up the multiple losses of faith and community, story and collective memory, that heralded the birth of secular Jewish culture. Naftali has it all. Though of humble origins, he procures an upper-class patron, a lifelong venue for his tales, a permanent home, and a mythical resting place for himself and his horse. The only recognizable trademark is this: the hero ends his career far from Jewish habitation, somewhere on the road between Lublin and Warsaw.

The success of Singer's stories for children, of which lavishly illustrated editions have appeared in every major language save Yiddish, suggests that the art of Yiddish storytelling must be viewed from the outside. Henceforth, the stories tell us, when a Yiddish writer reaches a certain advanced age, he becomes a saintly figure by default. Certainly Singer comes across this way in his English-language interviews in print and on film.⁶⁶ Then all of Yiddish culture perforce becomes a take for children—not demonic stories that even grownups fear to read at night, but pleasant parables of a bygone age in a forgotten language. The demon, whose parodic anger had done so much to rescue its author from despair, was finally laid to rest. It is a soppy ending to a long and pugnacious career, for no culture can hope to go on without a yeytser-hore.

Notes

1. Yehoash, “Undzere shyedim,” Fun der velt un yener (New York: Oyfgang, 1913), pp. 253-257; Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (Cleveland: Meridian Books and Jewish Publication Society, 1961), pp. 31-36; Yehuda Liebes, “Hatikkun Ha-Kelali of Reb Nahman of Brastlav and Its Sabbatean Links,” in his Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism, tr. Batya Stein (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 115-160.

2. Shmuel Werses, “Motivim dimonologiim be‘Susati’ shel Mendele umekoroteihem,” in MiMendele ‘ad Hazaz (From Mendele to Hazaz: Studies in the Development of Hebrew Prose; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987), pp. 70-86; Ruth R. Wisse, “The Jewish Intellectual and the Jews: The Case of Di Kliatshe (The Mare) by Mendele Mocher Sforim,” The Daniel E. Korshland Memorial Lecture (San Francisco: Congregation Emanu-El, 1992).

3. I. L. Peretz, “Monish,” tr. Seymour Levitan, The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (New York: Penguin, 1988), pp. 52-81; quote on p. 62. For discussion see Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), pp. 12-16.

4. “A biografisher notits fun Yitskhok Bashevis far Zalmen Reyzen,” Di goldene keyt 98 (1979): 17. This was written when Bashevis was about thirty-five years old and living in New York City.

5. Yitskhok Bashevis, Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub (New York: Der kval, 1956), p. 34 (henceforth cited Y). This episode, titled “The Lame Bride,” does not appear in the English ed. of In My Father's Court (henceforth E), tr. Channah Kleinerman-Goldstein, Elaine Gottlieb, and Joseph Singer (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1966). Four additional chapters appear in An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), pp. 285-313. No detailed comparison has been done of the two editions, but see “Dray ‘farshpetikte’ epizodn fun ‘Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub’,” introduction by Khone Shmeruk, Di goldene keyt 135 (1993): 173-188.

6. In chap. 31, “Mayn tate vert an anarkhist,” the narrator's father pays a rare visit to the balcony (p. 186; only in Yiddish). For an excellent (and much more appreciative) reading of this memoir, see Steven David Lavine, “Rhetoric for the Spirit: Repetition and Renovation in ‘In My Father's Court’,” in Recovering the Canon: Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. David Neal Miller (Leiden: Brill, 1986), pp. 116-132. Lavine discusses the importance of the balcony on p. 123.

7. Y 259, E 211. The Yiddish version, originally intended for readers of the Jewish Daily Forward, equates his kitchen curriculum with the history of western thought from Socrates to Bergson.

8. On the differences betwen “Warshawski” and “Bashevis,” see David Neal Miller, Fear of Fiction: Narrative Strategies in the Works of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), chap. 2.

9. For the early career of Yitskhok Bashevis—before he became I. B. Singer—see Khone Shmeruk, “Bashevis-Zinger, Yitskhok,” Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers, ed. Berl Kagan (New York: Rayah Iman-Kagan, 1986), cols. 60-68; Moshe Yungman, “Singer's Polish Period: 1924 to 1935,” tr. Nili Wachtel (without notes) from Hasifrut 27 (1978): 118-133, in Yiddish 6:2-3 (1985): 25-38; Ruth R. Wisse, “Singer's Paradoxical Progress,” Commentary (February 1979), pp. 33-38, rpt. in Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (1981): 148-159. At least three full-scale biographies of Singer, by Janet Hadda, Khone Shmeruk, and Leonard Wolf, are now in progress. They will doubtless add much to our understanding of Singer's formative years.

10. On 1924 as a year of crisis, see Yungman, pp. 28-29. On I. J. Singer, see Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Melekh Ravitch, Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn lebn, 1921-1934 (The Storybook of My Life; Tel Aviv: Y. L. Perets, 1975), pp. 87-114. On I. J. Singer's bitter experience in Kiev and Moscow, see his “Letter from America” in Forverts, 7 June 1941, tr. as “Appendix A” to Sholem Groesberg, “I. J. Singer's Novellas: The Vicissitudes of a Belletrist's Career,” (unpublished M.A. thesis, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1991). In “A Boy Philosopher” Bashevis Singer suggests that the sexual deviance of the biblical Bathsheba was one reason for adopting the name as his own. In My Father's Court, pp. 208-209.

11. David Neal Miller, Bibliography of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1924-1949 (New York: Peter Lang, 1983), does not include Bashevis' contributions to the Warsaw Yiddish press, but it's the best we have so far. For a critical discussion of these naturalist sketches, see Yungman, “Singer's Polish Period,” and Miller, Fear of Fiction, chap. 1. For a popular overview of Yiddish naturalism, see Y. I. Trunk, Idealizm un naturalizm in der yidisher literatur (Warsaw, 1927), and Di yidishe proze in Poyln in der tkufe tsvishn beyde velt-milkhomes (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-farband fun poylishe yidn in Argentine, 1949).

12. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Eyniklekh,” Varshever shriftn (Warsaw: Literatn-klub baym fareyn fun yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn in Varshe, 1926-27), 4th sequence, pp. 2-11; “In letste teg,” A mol in a yoyvl: zamlbukh 2 (Warsaw-Vilna: Farlag B. Kletskin, 1931): 139-151.

13. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Verter oder bilder,” Literarishe bleter 34 (1927): 663-665. For discussion see Wisse, Studies in American Jewish Literature, p. 152, and Yungman, pp. 31-33.

14. Aaron Zeitlin, “Der kult fun gornisht un di kunst vi zi darf zayn,” Varshever shriftn (Warsaw, 1926-27), separate pagination. For the hidden connection to Italian futurism, see Yekhiel Szeintuch, “Ben sifrut leḥazon: tekufat Varsha beyetsirato haduleshonit shel Aharon Tseitlin,” Kovets meḥkarim ‘al yahadut Polin: Sefer lezikhro shel Paul Glikson (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 117-139. Also, Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972).

15. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile: An Autobiographical Trilogy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), p. 97.

16. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Oyfn oylem-hatoyhu,” Di yidishe velt (Warsaw) 1 (1928): 54; rpt. Di goldene keyt 124 (1988): 87-95, quote on p. 88.

17. Singer claims this story as veiled autobiography. Love and Exile, pp. 150-151.

18. See the fascinating article by Nathan Cohen, “Ha‘itonut hasensatsyonit beVarsha bein shtei milḥamot ha‘olam,” Qesher 11 (May 1992), Eng. abstract, pp. 28e-29e; in Hebrew, pp. 81-94. On Yiddish shund in general, see Khone Shmeruk, “Letoldot sifrut ha ‘shund’ beyidish,” Tarbiz 52 (1983): 325-354.

19. Cohen, pp. 84-87, 90-91.

20. These stories and sketches, published in Undzer ekspres from 1925 to 1931, do not appear in any published bibliography of Singer's writings. They were discovered by Khone Shmeruk. My sincere thanks to Devora Menashe for making available to me copies of the xeroxes Professor Shmeruk sent to her. The stories referred to here are, in chronological order: “In a hek” (27 January 1928); “Berl formalist” (18 April 1930); “Der estet” (9 May 1930), and “Stam azoy” (16 May 1930).

21. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Tsu der frage fun dikhtung un politik,” Globus 3 (1932): 39-49.

22. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Vegn Dovid Bergelsons Baym dnieper,” Globus 5 (1932): 56-65; “Eyn loshn,” Globus 15 (1933): 67-78.

23. Yitskhok Bashevis, Der sotn in Goray, serialized in Globus, January-September 1933; pub. with foreword by Aaron Zeitlin (Warsaw: Bibliotek fun yidishn P.E.N.-klub, 1935); 2nd ed., Der sotn in Goray a mayse fun fartsaytns un andere dertseylungen (New York: Farlag matones, 1943), reissued in a photo-offset ed. (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1972). English tr., Jacob Sloan, Satan in Goray (New York: Noonday Press, 1955).

24. On the stylistic features of the novel, see Khone Shmeruk, “Monologue as Narrative Strategy in the Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in Miller, Recovering the Canon, pp. 99-101; Dan Miron, “Passivity and Narration: The Spell of Bashevis Singer,” Judaism 41:1 (1992): 14-16. On the grotesque, see Maximillian E. Novak, “Moral Grotesque and Decorative Grotesque in Singer's Fiction,” The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Marcia Allentuk (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 44-63. For an early appreciation of the novel, see Avrom Ayzen, “Yitskhok Bashevis, ‘Der sotn in Goray’,” YIVO-bleter 12 (1937): 386-395. For an interpretation against the backdrop of contemporary events in Poland, see Seth L. Wolitz, “Satan in Goray as Parable,” Prooftexts 9 (1989): 13-25.

25. For the Mayse fun a ruakh in Korets that served as Bashevis' source, see Max Weinreich, Bilder fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte (Studies in the History of Yiddish Literature from its Beginnings to Mendele Moykher-Sforim; Vilna: Tomor, 1926), pp. 254-261. The characterization of Rechele owes much to Weinreich's analysis of the original dybbuk tale. See also Weinreich's chapter on Shabbetai Zvi in Shturemvint (Storm Wind: Scenes from Jewish History in the 17th Century; Vilna: Tomor, 1927), pp. 79-161, and Avraham Rubinstein, “Goray and Bilgoraj: The Literary World of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Historical-Social World of Polish Jewry,” Ex Cathedra (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1982), pp. 49-82. Abraham Novershtern reads this pietistic ending as Bashevis' way of repudiating Yiddish modernism. See “Tsvishn morgnzun un akhris-hayomim: tsu der apokaliptisher tematik in der yidisher literatur,” Di goldene keyt 135 (1993) 111-135.

26. Yitskhok Varshavski, Fun der alter un nayer heym (sequel to In My Father's Court), Forverts (15 February 1964). Singer here claims to have engaged in modernist experiments on a par with those of Joyce and Kafka, “although at that time I had not yet heard of them.” For a scholarly treatment of Singer's autobiographical writings, see Khone Shmeruk, “Bashevis Singer—In Search of His Autobiography,” Jewish Quarterly 29:4 (1981-82): 28-36.

27. I. B. Singer, “The Recruit,” In My Father's Court.

28. Shmeruk, “Bashevis-Zinger, Yitskhok,” col. 62.

29. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Arum der yidisher literatur in Poyln,” Di tsukunft (August 1943): 468-475. For the cultural significance of Chagall's painting, see my Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 284-289.

30. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Problemen fun der yidisher proze in Amerike,” Svive 2 (March-April 1943): 2-13; tr. “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America,” Robert H. Wolf, Prooftexts 9 (1989): 5-12. All citations are from the English translation, except for the word “obsolescent.” Bashevis speaks of Yiddish as “obsolete.” See also Itamar Even-Zohar and Khone Shmeruk, “Authentic Language and Authentic Reported Speech: Hebrew vs. Yiddish,” in Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, special issue of Poetics Today 11 (1990): 159-163.

31. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Der roye veeyne-nire (fun der serye dertseylungen ‘Dos gedenkbukh fun yeyster-hore’),” Svive 3 (1943): 16-31; 4 (1943): 24-43; rpt. Gimpl tam un andere dertseylungen (New York: CYCO, 1963), pp. 206-236. All page references are to the latter ed. The first to discuss The Devil's Diary as a discrete unit was Shmeruk, “Monologue as Narrative Strategy,” in Miller, Recovering the Canon, pp. 102-107.

32. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Unseen,” tr. Norbert Guterman and Elaine Gottlieb, Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Modern Library, 1966), p. 108. Unless otherwise indicated, all further refs. are to this ed., which I consider to be the best volume of Singer's stories in English.

33. See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Norton, 1957), pp. 57-61.

34. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Zaydlus der ershter (fun a serye dersteylungen u.n. ‘Dos gedenkbukh fun yeyster-hore’),” Svive 1 (1943): 11-24; Der sotn in Goray (1943), pp. 273-280; “Zeidlus the Pope,” tr. Joel Blocker and Elizabeth Pollet, Selected Short Stories, pp. 341-353.

35. My reading of “Zeidlus the Pope” owes much to an unpublished essay by Joseph Sherman, “The Jewish Pope: Interpellating Jewish Identity.”

36. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, tr. Shlomo Noble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 193-195, and “The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish,” in Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), pp. 103-117.

37. Langbaum, p. 59.

38. The comparison with Dik is drawn from Joseph Sherman's “The Jewish Pope.” See also David Levine Lerner, “The Enduring Legend of the Jewish Pope,” Judaism 40 (Spring 1991): 148-170.

39. Cf. “tsu a yor finf, zeks un draysik, iz er [Zeydl] geven azoy a kener, az s'iz nisht geven zayns glaykhn in gants medines Poyln” (By the time he was thirty-five no one in all Poland could equal him in learning; Y 275, E 343) with “S'iz geven a mol an ile, / nisht gekent di velt afile, / nor in Poyln, un, a ponem / in der guter alter tsayt” (There was a prodigy, / precisely when or where is hard to say, / but in Poland, / in olden days). The balladeer, like the storyteller, then goes on to list the weighty tomes this prodigy has mastered.

40. The same is true of the learned characters in Bashevis' novels, especially The Family Moskat.

41. “Tsvey meysim geyen tantsn,” in 1943 ed. of Der sotn in Goray, pp. 289-305; tr. Joseph Singer and Elizabeth Pollet, “Two Corpses Go Dancing,” The Séance and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp. 187-201; “A togbukh fun a nisht-geboyrenem,” Der sotn in Goray, pp. 253-270; tr. Nancy E. Gross, “From the Diary of One Not Born,” Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), pp. 135-145.

42. “Der khurbm fun Kreshev” (henceforth cited Y), Der sotn in Goray (1943), p. 193; tr. Elaine Gottlieb and June Ruth Flaum, “The Destruction of Kreshev,” The Collected Stories of I. B. Singer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p. 94; henceforth abbreviated E.

43. Ruth R. Wisse, unpub. essay, “Singer in the Yiddish Tradition.”

44. See Sholem Asch, Kiddush Hashem, tr. Rufus Learsi (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1946). See also Chava Rosenfarb, “Yitskhok Bashevis un Sholem Ash (a pruv fun a farglaykh),” Di goldene keyt 133 (1992): 75-104. Rosenfarb perceives striking similarities between the two writers, whereas I see fierce oedipal struggle.

45. Sholem Asch, “Kola Street,” tr. Norbert Guterman, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York, 1989), pp. 260-261.

46. These are the dates of the original Yiddish versions. In English, the stories appeared in diverse and disparate settings, having no direct bearing on the Holocaust, or on anything else for that matter.

47. “Gimpl tam,” orig. in Passover ed. of Yidisher kemfer; rpt. Der shpigl un andere dertseylungen, ed. Khone Shmeruk (Jerusalem: Yiddish Department, Hebrew University, 1974), pp. 33-47; tr. Saul Bellow, Selected Short Stories, pp. 3-19. My interpretation is based on Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), chap. 4, and Janet Hadda, “Gimpel the Full,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 283-295. On the significance of tam, see Shmeruk, “Monologue as Narrative Strategy,” p. 99.

48. “Di kleyne shusterlekh,” orig. in Di tsukunft (April 1945); Gimpl tam un andere dertseylungen, pp. 18-43; tr. Isaac Rosenfeld, “The Little Shoemakers,” Selected Short Stories, pp. 68-95.

49. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Der katlen (a bobe-mayse),” rpt. Der shpigl un andere dertseylungen, pp. 57-74; tr. Shlomo Katz, “The Wife Killer: A Folk Tale,” Selected Short Stories, pp. 40-56. For a discussion of the female narrators in Bashevis' monologues—provenance, unique style, and subject matter—see Miller, Fear of Fiction, chap. 3.

50. Thanks to Khone Shmeruk's edition of Der shpigl un andere dertseylungen, the Yiddish reader can enjoy the best of Bashevis' monologues and study each subgroup in chronological order. For the English versions, see “Three Tales,” Selected Short Stories, pp. 325-340; “The Blizzard,” A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1974), pp. 65-80. Of the later collections, The Image and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985) is especially rich in monologues of the Aunt Yentl variety. Bendet Daddy, whose narrative style depends on vulgarisms and lehavdl-loshn for its machismo, fares poorly in English.

51. See Miron, “Passivity and Narration.” The quote is from “Tseytl un Rikl” (1966), Der shpigl, p. 93; “Zeitel and Rickel,” tr. Mirra Ginsburg, The Séance and Other Stories, p. 117.

52. Bashevis, “Der shpigl” (1956), Der shpigl, p. 2; “The Mirror,” tr. Norbert Guterman, Selected Short Stories, p. 58. See Ken Frieden, “I. B. Singer's Monologues of Demons,” Prooftexts 5 (1985): 263-268.

53. Since it was Peretz who introduced satanic doggerel into Yiddish literature, it is appropriate for the devil to echo lines and rhymes from “Monish.” Thus, “iz Samoel gerekht, az er iz hekht fun ale hekht” echoes the famous opening stanzas of Peretz's mock-epic poem.

54. “Mayse Tishevits,” orig. in Forverts (29 March 1959); Der shpigl, pp. 12-22; tr. Martha Glicklich and Cecil Hemley, Selected Short Stories, pp. 300-311.

55. “Arum der yidisher literatur in Poyln,” p. 472. Reb Abraham Zalman, the local messiah of Tishevits, is also mentioned in chap. 3 of Satan in Goray.

56. See R. Avrom Shtern, “Der Tishevitser meshiekh ben Yoysef,” in Pinkes Tishevits, ed. Jacob Zipper (Tel Aviv: Irgun yots'ei Tishevits, 1970), pp. 50-57. For more on the town, see Diane K. Roskies and David G. Roskies, The Shtetl Book: An Introduction to East European Jewish Life and Lore, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Ktav, 1979), pp. 137-139.

57. The comparison to Peretz is drawn from Ruth Wisse's unpublished essay, “Singer in the Yiddish Tradition.”

58. See my Against the Apocalypse for an analysis of this rhymed ending and its parallels in Yiddish folklore.

59. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Taybele un Humizah” (1962), Mayses fun hintern oyvn (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Perets, 1971), p. 86; tr. Mirra Ginsburg, “Taibele and Her Demon,” Selected Short Stories, pp. 235-248.

60. “Aleyn,” orig. in Svive (1960); Gimpl tam un andere dertseylungen, pp. 168-179; tr. Joel Blocker, “Alone,” Selected Short Stories, pp. 312-324.

61. “Di kafeterye,” orig. in Di tsukunft (March-April, 1968); Mayses fun hintern oyvn, pp. 43-71; tr. by the author and Dorothea Straus in Collected Stories, pp. 287-300.

62. “The whole in the fabric of reality” is Tzvetan Todorov's definition of the fantastic. See The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), chap. 2. I owe some insights on this story to Dan Miron.

63. For a comparison of the Old and New World settings in Singer's fiction, see Janet Hadda, “The Double Life of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Prooftexts 5 (1985): 165-181.

64. Other changes are more innocent, though more puzzling too. In Saul Bellow's otherwise exemplary translation of “Gimpel the Fool” only one sentence was omitted (by whom?), concerning the immaculate conception of Jesus. “Ot zogt men dokh,” says Gimpel to himself, trying to rationalize the birth of his firstbon son a mere seventeen weeks after the wedding, “az s'yoyizl hot in gantsn keyn tatn nisht gehat” (Why, I've heard it said the Little Jesus didn't have a father at all! Y 38). For a spirited defense of the Yiddish originals, both of Bashevis' short and long fiction, see Khone Shmeruk, “A briv in redaktsye,” Di goldene keyt 134 (1992): 64-66. There Shmeruk says he plans in subsequent work to expose the “unbelievable awkwardness and ignorance” that characterize the translations of Singer's work. In an unpublished paper, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin has analyzed other ways in which Singer adapted his Yiddish works for the English reader, as when he turned “Joseph and Koza” from a Yiddish legend into an English fairy tale.

65. “Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus,” tr. Joseph Singer, in Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stories for Children (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), pp. 167-183, and “Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?” ibid., pp. 332-338. For an appreciation of Singer's stories for children, see Thomas P. Riggio, “The Symbols of Faith: Isaac Bashevis Singer's Children's Books,” in Miller, Recovering the Canon, pp. 133-144; Khone Shmeruk, “Arum Y. Bashevises dertseylung far kinder ‘Yoysef un Koza’,” Di goldene keyt 131 (1991): 131-133, idem, “Yitskhok Bashevises dertseylung ‘An erev-khanike in Varshe’,” ibid. 132 (1991): 38-40, and “Yitskhok Bashevis: der mayse-dertseyler far kinder,” Oksforder yidish 3 (1995): 233-280. Most of Singer's stories for children, as Shmeruk points out, were written for adult readers of the Jewish Daily Forward and were signed by the middlebrow “Yitskhok Warshawski.”

66. These interviews have now been collected by Grace Farrell in Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992). In my review of that book, I try to show how Singer manipulated his interviewers. See “The Fibs of I. B. Singer,” Forward (18 December 1992).