Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writer and Critic
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writer and Critic
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS • November 11, 2019 • By David Stromberg
THE LIFEWORK OF Isaac Bashevis Singer, though researched by many, is still being mapped. Not only are there troves of unpublished or untranslated writings by Singer — fiction, memoir, and criticism — but much of the context for that work has not yet been properly explored. This is in part because Singer functioned in more than one capacity as a literary artist. In the United States, he became a writer, translator, editor, and critic, working in both Yiddish and English, composing his literary work according to his own developing artistic principles. Many of these principles were clearly articulated in critical articles published pseudonymously in Yiddish, where Singer expressed his ideas on culture and society and on the artist’s place in them. But these articles remained largely unpublished, although he later presented many of them as lectures in English. And so, in order to understand the context of his writing, we must explore the way that his essayistic work informed his literary production.
As a literary artist, Isaac Bashevis Singer worked in at least three modes: a Yiddish-language writer and journalist named Yitskhok Bashevis (who published under two additional pseudonyms), an English-language author named Isaac Bashevis Singer, and an in-between authorial figure who negotiated the transition from one to the other, to whom I sometimes refer as IBS. The Yiddish Singer — the one whom Yiddishists call simply Bashevis — was an artist, a journalist, and a public intellectual who changed and developed over nearly 70 years of writing and publishing. The Yiddish Bashevis made his living by publishing several articles pseudonymously each week in the Yiddish daily Forverts — and while at first people didn’t know that the artist was the same person as the occultist who was the same person as the intellectual, with time it became known that Itzhok Varshavsky, and eventually even D. Segal, were the same person as Yitzkhok Bashevis.
The English Singer is known as Isaac Bashevis Singer — also called Isaac Singer or simply Isaac. This Singer, who shares the personal history and characteristics described above, started publishing in the United States in 1950 with the translation of The Family Moskat — his first serious experience reformulating himself into English. In 1953, Saul Bellow translated his story “Gimpel Tam” as “Gimpel the Fool” and it was published in Partisan Review. This was followed in 1955 by a translation of Singer’s 1933 short novel, Satan in Goray, by Singer and Jacob Sloan, a story collection titled Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories in 1957, and the novel The Magician of Lublin in 1960. By the early 1960s, the English Singer was gaining critical attention from young American literati interested in this 60-year-old Jewish storyteller from the Old World who’d appeared, it seemed, out of nowhere. But in fact, they were dealing with a seasoned European intellectual who had laid out his literary path with great focus and deliberateness.
The authorial IBS, the one between the Yiddish Bashevis and the English Singer, was a highly punctilious literary artist. He was the one who, at the age of 50, began looking over nearly 30 years of literary production in Yiddish to decide which works could be used to invent his image in English and connect with an audience that was much larger than the linguistic and cultural world to which he belonged and from which he drew his strength and imagination. This is also the IBS who began to consolidate his ideas on philosophy, art, and human nature into an integrated moral and aesthetic vision. This is the IBS who guided the dissemination of the other two — and thanks to him we still have access to both the Yiddish Bashevis, whose work is finally being digitized and made available, and the English Singer, whose translated works are still being published.