The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer

Introduction

Introduction The fiction in English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer (–), winner of the  Nobel Prize for Literature, has long been known to general readers and literary critics alike. Less well known are the original Yiddish texts from which these works in English derive. This volume of essays attempts to resurrect, recover, and restore the authentic voice and vision of the writer known to his Yiddish readers as Yitskhok Bashevis. From the time Bashevis’s fiction first appeared in English in , Yiddish literary critics have drawn attention to the differences that exist between these two strangelydifferent corpuses of work.The English versions are generally shortened, often shorn of much description and religious matter, and their perspectives and denouements are altered significantly. A need has now arisen to pay more critical attention to the Yiddish texts, to appreciate the significant differences between the originals and the translations, and to recognize the implication of these differences for the literary achievement of their creator. At this juncture of scholarly appreciation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s oeuvre, this book seeks to establish that the Yiddish original should be the primary source for study of the master’s fictions. To be sure, subsequent translations and transformations from the original Yiddish reflect the differences of perceptions of other linguistic cultures, but they obscure—if they do not entirely eclipse—the original Yiddish creation and the uniquely Jewish culture it elaborates and interprets. Serious scholarship in any literature always starts with the original text in its original language, and the Yiddish texts of Bashevis Singer should be no exception. All the essays in this book, for the first time in the scholarly evaluation of this writer’s work, are by specialists in Yiddish literature and linguistics; their studies are all based on theYiddish originals, which have at times been rigorouslycompared with their English versions. These studies therefore offer a reinterpretation of the writer from a perspective not often taken and thus underscore his identity as a distincxiii tively Yiddish voice and an empowered interpreter of his own Jewish culture. This book seeks clearly to establish that Bashevis belongs first and foremost to Yiddish language and culture and only secondarily to the broad and great stream of twentieth-century American literature. Bashevis Singer’s ambivalent dual position is entirely due to the surgical skills of translators, publishers, editors, and, indeed, Singer himself, who was never opposed to any changes in his English translations that would enhance his popularity among readers. The studies published here seek to clarify the distinct Yiddish environments in which Bashevis lived, observed, and created. The textured vitality of his Yiddishspeaking milieux emerges in his Yiddish writings, whether anchored in the traditionally observant village of Bilgoray, seething through Warsaw’s Krochmalna Street, swirling along the exilic blocks of New York City, or loping about the retirement community of Art Deco Miami Beach. These new essays view Bashevis from a perspective that differs from that of most earlier critics. Reading their author only in English, the majority of these earlier critics remove the writer from his Yiddish-language-based culture, make him marginal to his own linguistic milieu, construct of him an American writer of Jewish origins, and thus invent an English prose master, Isaac Bashevis Singer, out of a subsumed Yiddish writer, Yitskhok Bashevis. By deliberate contrast, the critics in this new volume focus directly on the Yiddish culture that produced this Yiddish writer and his Yiddish works. Their essays identify Yitskhok Bashevis the man, the artist, and his culture as part of a vibrant Yiddish way of life that was massacred in its prime. Struggling on determinedly, fully aware that he is among the last voices of a Yiddish universe that had been dealt a mortal blow, Bashevis projects through his art a vision of that exterminated world, validates its existence, and offers a uniquely personal interpretation of it. Bashevis was the pen-name he himself chose when he started writing, to distinguish his own voice and vision from those of his older brother Israel Joshua Singer (–), then still alive, famous, respected, and widely read. Unlike I. J. Singer, Bashevis writes not as an ideologue of some political persuasion, nor as a prophet with a didactic moral stance, but as an author functioning within, and drawing inspiration from, the linguistic and cultural parameters of his own Eastern European Ashkenazic Jewry—a people basically disenfranchised, but possessing an ancient heritage, a distinctive religious perspective, and...