On the Trail of The Salamander
On the Trail of The Salamander
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first literary venture was lost for almost a century—until a partial copy resurfaced in an attic in Poland.
Some months ago a thin parcel arrived at the Yiddish Book Center postmarked Lublin, Poland. Inside were a few stiff sheets of yellowing card. Crinkled and mottled, they looked and felt like oversized Passover matzos. On one side, deeply imprinted, were four-square layouts of Tehillim, the Hebrew psalms, and pages from the siddur, the standard Jewish prayer book. On the other: double-page proofs in Yiddish. It was an extraordinary feeling to see and hold them, knowing the saga of their survival. Dating from the 1920s, they had outlived bombing raids, fires, and the murder of almost everyone whose hands had ever touched them.
The sheets from Poland were the biggest clues in a mystery worthy of Bashevis himself—the complete disappearance of the literary journal he edited as a young man, barely out of his teens. Salamandrye (Salamander) is the holy grail of Singer scholarship. No library in the world has a copy. Not a single one appears to have survived. It is as if the young Singer had devised the perfect vanishing act—a mythical journal named after a creature with supposed supernatural powers.
A few years ago, however, the story took an extraordinary turn. A cache of old printers’ proofs turned up in Bilgoraj, the Polish town where Singer was living when he edited the journal. The proofs found their way to Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Poland’s leading Singer scholar. She saw the name Salamandrye on one of the sheets and immediately recognized their significance.
On the following pages, Professor Adamczyk-Garbowska finds traces of the mature Singer’s genius in his first literary venture. And you’ll find three Pakn Treger exclusives: translated excerpts from Singer’s earliest writings; new details of his ties to a renowned family of printers; and full-size reproductions of some Salamandrye page proofs, exactly as they resurfaced in Bilgoraj.