The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer

Appendix. Bashevis Singer as a Regionalist of Lublin Province: A Note

Appendix Bashevis Singer as a Regionalist of Lublin Province A Note Seth L. Wolitz and Joseph Sherman Geographically speaking, the prolific output of I. Bashevis Singer is set in a number of locales in Poland, the eastern United States, Israel, and—rarely—a few Western European cities and even South America. Where his major long novels—The Family Moskat, The Manor, and The Slave—paint vast frescoes depicting the sweeping historical changes that Poland underwent between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, his short stories, by striking contrast, tend to be set in specific and narrowly circumscribed topographical locations , the overwhelming number of which are situated in Poland during a very particular period of that country’s checkered geographical and political history. Although Bashevis set a number of his best-known tales in distinctively Jewish areas of Warsaw, all bounded by specifically named streets—Krochmalna (Polish: Krachmalna) Street, the place in which his family’s apartment was situated, has become particularly well known to his readers—the majority of his short stories are set in numerous small towns and shtetlekh situated in Lublin Province. This province is named after its capital and most important city, Lublin, a locality that played a highly significant role throughout Polish history and was of particular centrality for the Jews of Poland. Lublin is located southeast of Warsaw; during the halcyon days of the Respublica, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the Renaissance and the early seventeenth century, when the city of Krakow was the capital of Poland, Lublin was a far more important metropolitan area than Warsaw itself. Lublin was Poland’s major trading city and as such held an important annual trade fair, because it straddled the crossroads between the east-west and north-south trade routes. As a consequence, Lublin attracted merchants from all over Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.The Jews of Poland inevitably played an important part in this extensive mercantile activity. Many Jewish merchants of considerable substance attended the city’s trade fair; eminent rabbis held deliberations there and set up rabbinical courts (bateydin). Several important Jewish physicians practiced in Lublin in the sixteenth century, one of whom served the king of Poland. And the leaders  of numerous Eastern European Jewish communities traveled to Lublin to discuss communal affairs and problems of mutual concern. A substantial Jewish population lived in Lublin, and, given its central location, the city attracted many rabbis and learned Jews who established important yeshivas and printing houses that became renowned throughout Eastern Europe. The most famous of the Rabbinical figures was the Maharam of Lublin, Rabbi Meir ben Gedaliah of Lublin (–), whose Talmudic Academy drew students from all over Poland and beyond and underscored that Lublin was the major center of religious Jewish thought. Lublin’s committed Jewish character led to its establishment as the administrative center of the Council of the Four Lands (Va’ad Arba Artsot), the central institution of Jewish self-government in Poland and Lithuania that endured from the sixteenth century until . (This unique institution served as a model into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of what many Eastern European Jewish groups sought to restore or re-create on both the political and cultural levels.) Lublin subsequentlyalso became a creative centerof the Hasidic movement which swept Galicia and southern Poland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a movement which, with its revolutionary reinvigoration of faith, also sparked competing dynastic courts and factional rivalries. Yakov Yitskhok ha-Khozeh (–), known as the ‘‘Seer of Lublin,’’ was the key Hasidic rabbi and miracle worker credited with making Congress Poland and Galicia a great center of Hasidism. This movement continued to exert a profound influence on Jewish life throughout the world right up to the outbreak of World War II. When Poland as a historical and geographical entity was fragmented as a result of its numerous partitions by foreign powers, Lublin and its surrounding areas first were absorbed by Austria in  and then, after the Congress of Vienna in , passed under the control of Russia, where they remained as part of the tsarist empire until the end of World War I. For nearly a century, therefore, it was the tsarist government that defined the parameters of Lublin Province, and it is this province, so defined, that dominates the geography of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories. In political and historical terms, the actual tsarist province of Lublin stretched southward from the city of Lublin to the...