The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Walking with my family up the main street of Wengen, a mountain resort high in the Swiss Alps, in the summer of , I swore I had just seen Isaac Bashevis Singer pass us by. My wife—an economist—scoffed. What would he be doing here? She slyly suggested I must be affected by the pure mountain air. In fact I had just delivered a paper at Oxford on Bashevis Singer’s occult novel Satan in Goray. No! It was Bashevis Singer, I insisted, and ran off to find him. But he was nowhere to be seen. Gone! Disappeared—as in his own stories! Did my eyes deceive me? Was I prepared to return crestfallen to my attentive wife and mumble: ‘‘You were right, darling’’? No! I did see him. But where did he go? Desperate, I looked up and down this one long street and suddenly noticed a small alley. I raced into the alley, which soon opened into a small square where the Hotel Victoria stood like some half-Gothic horror. I dashed in and asked, ‘‘Is Herr Singer here?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ replied the clerk. ‘‘He just went up in the elevator.’’ Hotel Victoria indeed! I immediately wrote a note in Yiddish explaining that I had given a paper on Bashevis Singer’s novel Satan in Goray and his use of parody (actually I had called it creative plagiarism ) and would be honored to meet him. He called shortly later and invited me to join him for dinner—vegetarian—at the hotel. Bashevis Singer was in good form, but his wife, Alma, was ill. He liked to hide in Wengen, he told me, so that he could write in peace and correct proofs. He wanted to know in great detail what occurred at the Oxford conference of Yiddish Studies, who was there, and the quality of the papers and the Yiddish. He was delighted to learn that there was a movement to study his writings from the Yiddish and not from the English. I promised him that one day I should like to publish a book of critical articles based entirely on the texts written in Yiddish. He wondered if that would be possible given the passing of Yiddish. But he wished me well, and we pursued other topics such as why he would never set foot in Germany or Poland and why he believed in vegetarianism. The memory of the days spent at Wengen ix seeing him twice more has served as a goad to produce this first volume of critical studies entirely based on his original Yiddish texts. The idea became feasible when my friend and colleague Professor Joseph Sherman of the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, came to the University of Texas to organize the manuscripts of Isaac Bashevis Singer housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. These rare manuscripts and realia were obtained through the active support of the  director, Thomas F. Staley; the ingenuity of Robert King, the former dean and specialist in German and Yiddish linguistics; and the generous donations of Texan philanthropists. I proposed to Professor Sherman, who was already well known as a superb translator of Bashevis Singer, that if he were to translate some unpublished material and perhaps write a critical article, I would bring together other Yiddish scholars to create and publish new interpretations of Isaac Bashevis Singer based finally on the original texts, many of which were now available at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. Professor Sherman was most enthused and took up this idea. He also performed a splendid task in clarifying the contents of the Bashevis archives. I wish to acknowledge fully how often he volunteered his help and services for this volume, which is as much an expression of his profound appreciation of Yiddish literature as of my own and that of ourcolleagues. His is perhaps of a special intensity, for he has toiled with Singer’s works not only in manuscripts but in translations, in ordering his archives but also in editing his works and those of others. Indeed, Joseph Sherman is a scholar who joins other unsung heroes in Jewish history like Professor Nissan Babalikashvili of Tiblisi, Georgia, and Professor Alexander Scheiberof Budapest, Hungary, engaged in the bitter task of closing the intellectual and cultural accounts of their dying communities. His work for South African Yiddish literature and Yiddish literature in general places his name in the Scroll of Righteous Men. It was Thomas...