Can We Escape The Past? Examining Jewish Identity Through Singer's Lens
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt.
By: Louis Finkelman
Many of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s essays, published in the Yiddish newspaper Forverts in the grim years from 1939 to 1945, unfortunately read as contemporary now. White Goat Press and editor/translator David Stromberg have brought us, in Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt, the writer’s observations about a world in which antisemites had achieved extraordinary successes, just when our world seems again enraptured by antisemitism.
In one essay, for example, Singer asks, “Is Being Powerless a Jewish Ideal?” Some of the intellectuals in his day idealized the weak condition of Jews in the diaspora. Where other peoples committed acts of coercive violence, Jews did not. We could, therefore, criticize persecutors from a position of moral superiority because we always find ourselves among “those pursued, and not the pursuers.”
I spoke with Stromberg about Singer’s approach to writing about Europe for an audience of American Jews, his shifting perspective on Israel and the unique challenges of editing a multilingual writer who often did his own translations.