The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (review)

Book Reviews 109 The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer, by Anita Norich. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. 142 pp. $29.95. This monograph is the first comprehensive study of I. J. Singer since Irving Howe's article in 1966 with the revealing title of "The Other Singer." According to the author, her book was not intended as a biography. Rather, she seeks to examine the thematic or structural concerns that determine Singer's works. Underlying Anita Norich's assumptions is the hypothesis that Singer despaired of the social world around him, and that the "tension" (an important term for her) between it and the Jewish culture of his time is recreated in his "fiction." In the preface to her study, the author explains that she attempted to identify the Yiddish and Jewish cultural structures to which Singer responded as well as their European and American contexts. Norich seeks to furnish a reading of Singer's "texts" that is detached from the usual view through the distorted prism of their demise brought about by the Nazi genocide and the Stalinist purges. She wants to avoid their treatment as invalids who must be protected from too much scrutiny and be made as comfortable as possible before death. She wishes to apply the strategies of contemporary literary theory to classical Yiddish and Jewish sources in keeping with a growing "impressive discourse" that treats Yiddish texts as representational documents. Thus she embarks on her brave and ambitious project. With its canon rapidly reaching closure, the special status of Yiddish literature is acknowledged as a factor, but it is not allowed to distort the evidence or hobble the critic. Her monograph is divided into a preface, six chapters discussing various aspects of his life and works, notes, an extensive bibliography, and an index. In the individual chapters, I. J. Singer's prose writings are contextualized and read as cultural history and dystopias of the modern and Jewish tropes of rootlessness in the context of Zion and America: as Jewish history as cyclical patterns in di brider ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenasi) and di mishpokhe karnovski (The Karnovski Family); as a view of the individual as a social construct and the self as a psychological one, especially in khaver nakhmen (Comrade Nakhmen); as a process of a relationship between creativity and social reality, foregrounding the figure of the artist in his stories that cannot hope to overcome the limitations imposed on it by a resistant environment-not even in its art; finally, as representation and referentiality in his autobiography fun a velt vos iz nishto mer (Of a World That Is No More), with the latter functioning as 110 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 complement and intertext to the autobiographical discourse in the writings of his siblings Esther Kreitman and Bashevis Singer. The issue in I. J. Singer criticism has always been the question of modernity versus literary modernism. When it comes to modernity (whatever its definition?) Jews and non-Jews have different expectations. The European model involves the privileging of individual behavior. With the Jewish paradigm, certain specifics predate their undermining by European modernism, such as Eastern European antisemitism, Zionism, and Jewish powerlessness. Singer's association with the avant-garde group di khaliastre (The Gang) is discussed as well as his philosophical pessimism. The latter is reflected in the depiction of the experience of Jewish life in terms of a semiotic system from which there is no escape but which no longer seems to have material reality. The characters in Singer's novels cannot break free from the signs of Jewishness such as clothing, speech, bearing, and collective and individual fate. It is Singer's unceasing lament that Jews are doomed to endless repetition, because of the cyclical nature of their history. Anita Norich is well disposed toward her subject and even defends Singer's participation in popular culture (the essays by G. Kuper in the foroerts [The Forward]) by pointing to the fact that low culture and high culture were merely two voices vying for the same diminishing audience. She criticizes Singer, however, for leaving all tensions in his works unresolved and for positing a modern reality...