On A Ship
On A Ship
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish author who immigrated to the United States in 1935, only four years before the Nazi invasion of Poland. He established his literary career in New York and was the author of eighteen novels, fourteen children’s books, and seven memoirs in English, though he remains best known as a writer of short stories. Singer was awarded a National Book Award in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. He died in 1991 at the age of eighty-seven.
Almost all of Singer’s stories were first published in Yiddish, most often in The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish newspaper for which Singer worked. “On a Ship” is a rare exception. Believed to be written sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the story was sent to us by David Stromberg, the editor of Singer’s estate. He found the story — translated to English and in handwritten fragments in Yiddish — while going through Singer’s vast archives. This is its first publication in any language. It was translated from the Yiddish by the author and Nancy Gerstein.
— Ed.
The Argentine ship La Plata was sailing from New York to Buenos Aires. The Theatre Solail, which had invited me to the première of my play, had sent me a first-class ticket. The trip was to take eighteen days. We were supposed to stop in Trinidad, Venezuela, and Brazil. The month of October was warm even in New York, and after a few days of sailing to the south it became hot. I sat on the deck in a lounge chair and near me another passenger sat reading the Book of Job. He was a little man with milk-white hair that hung on his neck in tufts and with the young face of a schoolboy. In his black eyes there was the doleful mildness sometimes seen in people who suffer from a chronic disease. He nodded his head as he read, and I imagined he was saying, Yes, yes, yes, right, right, right. He wore a pink shirt, pants that hung on broad old-fashioned suspenders, and a Panama hat. He smoked a long cigar.
On the other side of the deck sat a young couple with a little girl who seemed to be the delight of all the passengers. Everyone smiled at her and tried to play with her. She was a child of about three, with yellow curls, large blue eyes, and extraordinarily white and delicate skin. She looked like a doll and wore a white lace dress with folds and ribbons as dolls are sometimes outfitted. She spoke French and also a few words of English. Her name was Mimi.
For some reason, Mimi had become infatuated with my neighbor. Every few minutes she would run over to him, her little hands spread out, all joy and playfulness. She tried to get his attention by tugging at the cuff of his pants, at his sleeve, at his book. He would immediately put down the Bible, catch Mimi in his short arms, kiss her forehead, and start talking to her in a mixture of French and English — both languages in a foreign accent — with a dash of Galician Yiddish. He bounced her on his knees, shook her little hands, and held out his index finger, which she grabbed and pulled toward her. Each time, she attempted to take off his reading glasses, but he would say to her, “Darling, sois sage. Leave my glasses in peace. Je lis livre. Be a good meidele.”
The little one laughed and tried to mimic his gibberish. He searched his pockets for something she could play with. He gave her his fountain pen to hold. He took off his wristwatch and showed her how the second hand moved. He took out a cigar and pulled off the ring of gold paper and offered it to her. For a while Mimi looked at it half with curiosity and half with mockery. Then she attacked his glasses again. Soon her mother came over and took her away. I said to him, “When you start playing with a child, it’s a story without an end.”