Isaac Bashevis Singer exhibit

By Scott Eyman

Palm Beach Post Books Editor

Sunday, September 26, 2004

The world portrayed in Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction is gone now, but it was gone even when he was writing it.

Dybbuks sitting on the shoulders of the citizens of the shtetl, skullcapped Polish and Russian Jews living with irony, wisdom and a share of the grotesque are to be found only in Singer's stories and the photographs of Roman Vishniac - a lost world trapped between rural towns and bustling Warsaw, with the Nazi heel poised to obliterate both.

The Singer exhibit celebrating his centennial that runs through Oct. 9 at Florida Atlantic University's Ritter Art Gallery offers a fairly rich sample of Singer's life as well as a sense of the work. It's drawn from FAU's own considerable Singer collection and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, which bought Singer's papers in 1993, two years after he died in Miami Beach.

Born in 1904 into a family of rabbis, Singer had an older brother, Israel, who was also a highly respected novelist with a bent for multigenerational stories, except that he anchored them in a more specific social and economic setting than did his younger brother.

The exhibit shows that Singer never changed much - bald while still in his 20s, he always had that watchful, eagle stare of the born observer and was always a highly sexual man (he fathered an illegitimate child in 1929), while his writings and much objective evidence attest to his lifelong interest in the female of the species.

Singer arrived at Ellis Island on May 1, 1935, and set about slowly building a life, the artifacts of which make up the bulk of the exhibit.

Here is the secondhand desk he bought for $50 sometime in the '40s; here is his Polish passport; a page from his handwritten English/Yiddish dictionary; an earnings statement from the Jewish Daily Forward (175 E. Broadway), where he worked for 15 years after his arrival in America.

The statement shows that Singer made $3,619.51 for the year and ends with the printed admonition, "It is your duty to pay your income tax early and often."

You can see the diaries and daybooks in which he studiously worked at his English. And the Underwood typewriter he bought in 1935, the keys altered to type in Hebrew.

"If this typewriter doesn't like a story, it refuses to work," Singer said. Underwood should have placed that same model with a lot more writers.

The exhibit also includes some of the books he translated from German into Yiddish as a means of eking out a living while still in Poland: Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and its sequel, The Road Back. There's also a list of instructions to himself, including "Don't write more than two hours a day... don't be too proud or too humble."

And there are some love letters from women that Singer carefully placed in foreign language books in his library, which he knew his wife, who defined the term long-suffering, would never examine.

If nothing else, the exhibit speaks to the financial realities of a literary life - Singer's wife, Alma, worked at Lord & Taylor until the mid-'60s, well after he began publishing in The New Yorker. After he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, his life changed, but not radically, because by then, he was like one of his own characters - set in his ways.

Singer was a sort of living bridge between two worlds, one gone, another in a perpetual state of creation. He found America simultaneously committed to pluralism as well as assimilation. He undoubtedly believed he was memorializing the world he remembered from his childhood, but he found more landsmen than he imagined still existed in the Surfside neighborhood of Miami Beach.

There is a limited amount to be gained from perusing the detritus of a person's life, but an artist's debris at least lets you trace his process.

Mainly, the Singer exhibit compels admiration and respect for his character above and beyond his literary accomplishment.

This was an immigrant who worked hard to be successful in his new country without ever compromising his work - a tough little man who kept his own counsel.

A man, in short, you could trust to guide you through the demon-haunted world.