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851.9770
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352-9278 •
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CONDO-FOSTER
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Within city limits.
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286.0476
851.1900 (RAM)
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The Jewish News
354.6060
Book Throws Light On An Enigmatic Figure
• JOSEPH COHEN
Special to The Jewish News
T
he literary interview
in recent years has
come to be more fash-
ionable than ever before. Its
appeal is universal, for it satis-
fies, at least temporarily, our
insatiable need to know some-
thing specific about any
famous writer. If we've grown
accustomed to his face, we can't
get along without knowing his
ups and his downs. And we
want to get them straight from
the horse's mouth.
Today we are now getting
entire books of interviews all
on the same figure. We even
have famous authors — Phillip
Roth and Walker Percy are two
of them — who interview
themselves.
One recently published
book-length series of inter-
views is Conversations With
Isaac Bashevis Singer
(Doubleday) by Singer and his
interviewer Richard Burgin.
Expanded from several shorter
interviews that appeared orig-
inally in the New York Times
Magazine, the book is based on
Singer's premise that "We al-
ways have to discuss and re-
veal character because human
character is to us the greatest
puzzle. No matter how much
you know a human being, you
don't know him or her enough.
Discussing character consti-
tutes a supreme form of
entertainment." Whether the
discussion and revelation of
Singer's character is sup-
remely entertaining the indi-
vidual reader will have to de-
termine for himself or herself.
However, this book of conver-
sations is of unusual interest
because Singer has always
been and remains an enigma-
tic figure, and these dialogues
help to illuminate, though they
do not resolve, the puzzles that
surround him and his work.
For example, one of the
enigmas of Singer's life and
work is that he is among the
most modern of the anti-
modernists. With his first
novel Satan in Goray (pub-
lished in America in Yiddish in
1943), he broke dramatically
with the Yiddish tradi-
tionalists whose fiction is best
representated by Mendele
Mocher Seforim and Sholem
Aleichem. As Eli Katz has
pointed out in The Achieve-
ment of Isaac Bashevis Singer
(1969), "The readers of
classical Yiddish literature
were conditioned to find in
their reading indications of a
rational world of progress,
hope and brotherly assistance,
and the unmistakable assur-
ance of the authors' adherence
to these values. Singer de-
scribes instead an irrational,
asocial universe where, as
often as not ... the devil has
the last word."
While the devil doesn't al-
ways get the last world in
Singer's stories, the author's
naturalistic bent and his pes-
simism about humankind's
I.B. Singer: The devil has the
last word.
fate on this beleagured plant
clearly place him in the com-
pany of Kafka, Faulkner and
Joyce. Yet, he insists he is not a
modern-day nihilist and he ab-
jures any connection with
these writers. He doesn't want
to be identified with them at
all. He shrugs off references to
Faulkner, admitting that he
has not even read The Sound
and 'the Fury. Kafka, he
argues, is, in a ranking of ta-
lent, "much below Dos-
toyevsky," observing that "Af-
ter you read, say, 50 pages of
The Trial you get the point,"
and it's not worth going on
with it. As for Joyce, he says,
"To me ... Ulysses is almost
boring ... The stream of con-
sciousness (technique Joyce
uses) becomes," Singer insists,
"obvious very soon and there-
fore tedious."
Singer is opposed
to-didacticism
though it
permeates his
works.
To many of Singer's admir-
ers, the enigma of his
modernist/anti-modernist
stance is no more than aca-
demic hair-splitting. They can
rejoice when he says in one of
the interviews; "I never have
any other aim when I sit down
to write a story except the story
itself," adding that "If I have a
choice between a message and
a story, I always take the story
and let the message to to hell."
Well, yes and no. From
Satan in Goray through The
Family Moskat and The Magi-
cian of Lublin on up to Singer's
most recent collection, The
Image and Other Stories, he
hardly ever lets the message
"go to hell." "Gimpel the Fool"
would not be the greatest of all
short stories if it had no moral
message. Here again is an-
other enigma: Singer is op-
posed to didacticism though it
permeates his works. He may
disallow a didactic purpose for
literature, but his actions belie
his words. We understand his
.
61,,r7itil
need to insist that entertain-
ment must be the sine qua non
of literature, yet we also know
that in a civilized community
story-telling can never be
entirely dissociated from ethi-
cal consderations. Singer fre-
quently depicts characters who
sin; just as frequently he turns
them into penitents.
For the thoughtful reader,
these interviews will only
heighten rather than diminish
the dilemmas surrounding
Singer's value system.
Nonetheless, they give us,
among dialogues on many sub- •
jects, some detailed insights
into the literary likes and dis-
likes of this famous man of let-
ters. Rejecting Kafka, Faulk-
ner and Joyce, and Proust and
Beckett too, Singer maintains
that "the best literature was
written in the nineteenth cen-
tury." The greatest writers and
the ones who have influenced
him the most are Tolstoy,
Chekhov and Dostoyevsky.
The latter is described by him
as "a first-class genius" and his
Crime and Punishment is re-
peatedly singled out as an in-
spirational and practical
model.
Flaubert, Dickens, Balzac
and Gogol are also cited not
only for their narrative excel-
lence but for their willingness
to forget about themselves in
their writing, something
Kafka, Joyce and Proust were
unable to do. Singer thinks
writers should forget about
themselves, but, again, he
doesn't practice what he
preaches. His stories are full of
hiziiself, and in these conversa-
tions, he points to specific uses
of his own experience. It's an-
other puzzle, another enigma.
However, all these puzzles
and enigmas do not detract
from the appeal of this book be-
cause, as we noted at the out-
set, we've grown so accustomed
to his face that when he's will-
ing to talk, we are even more
willing to listen. Perhaps
that's the only thing there's no
puzzle about!
Copyright 1985 Joseph Cohen
Art Museum
Apologizes •
New York — Describing it as
a "reprehensible oversight,"
the Metropolitan Museum of
Art has expressed regret to the
Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai B'rith for a caption in its
Summer 1986 Bulletin which
described the owl as a symbol
of darkness "and hence of the
Jews who rejected Christ, the
light of the world."
Museum President William
H. Luers said, the Museum
found the offending passage
"regrettable and distressing."
He promised "to redouble our
efforts to guarantee that the
like does not happen again."
The Summer Bulletin, ti-
tled, "A Medieval Bestiary,"
was written by J.L. Schrader,
an historian. '
irier
14 ■ 11114;;;JU
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