Celebrating I.B. Singer,
a rakish raconteur.
By Carlin Romano

INQUIRER BOOK CRITIC
Philadelphia Inquirer, July 31, 2004

There's an expression in Yiddish, a warning to people with high ambition:
Az du kukst oif hoichen zachen halt tsu dos hitl.

("When you aim at the heights, hold on to your hat.")

But who knew that Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), the Nobel-Prize-winning writer everyone remembers as a puckish Jewish grandfather, might be wailing that song from above as the national celebration of his birth rolls into town tonight?

With a centennial comes lots of attention to an author's private life. And tonight at the Free Library, when Philadelphia's Fabulous Shpielkehs Klezmer band kicks off a reading from Singer's work by former Alice star Linda Lavin, and a talk by fast-rising scholar Ilan Stavans about Singer and women - well, let's just say Stavans won't be short on material.

His research as editor of the publishing centerpiece of the Singer celebration - The Library of America's just-issued three-volume collection of Singer's stories, as well as a biographical volume, Singer: An Album, illustrating the author's life- proved an eye-opener. While it did not shake his admiration for the man who mainstreamed Yiddish writing into American literary culture, it certainly revised the image of a nice little Jewish man who supposedly imagined most of the rich sexuality interlacing his work.

"The Singer I knew before I started looking through the material was the idealized writer, the one that had made it big in America," says Stavans, a Mexican American critic of Eastern European Jewish heritage who grew up speaking Yiddish and Spanish in Mexico City. "I knew very little about his private life. He was just a great storyteller.

"The picture that emerges, however," continues Stavans, "is one of a man who is selfish, who takes advantage of other people, a womanizer who often promises something to a lady with whom he has spent the night - who offered to translate one of his short stories - and then didn't get back to her. Someone who publishes a short story under his name alone, or doesn't send a check... . As an immigrant, he was a man always obsessed with money, who had a very complicated relationship with his wife Alma and his son, whom he had abandoned."

The revelations about Singer's character fuel just one of the controversies spicing up the centennial, making it livelier than most. In a recent special issue of the English-language Jewish Forward, the contemporary version of the Yiddish newspaper to which Singer contributed for decades, former Philadelphia journalist Jeff Shalet offered a droll piece on the author's "amorality."
He reported how at a Singer conference years ago at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., which hosted yet another Singer symposium last week, "wrinkled arms shot into the air" after a graduate student mentioned Singer's reputation as a womanizer who - literary lore now insists - seduced virtually every young Jewish woman who offered to translate his stories:

An antique beauty with orange hair and candy-red lips said: 'I knew Isaac. We use to meet for, eh, lunch. How to describe? Isaac was, he was... a passionate man.' The speaker's husband, sitting beside her, looked out the window resolutely."

"Of course," says Stavans, who teaches Jewish and Latin Studies at Amherst College, "as you enter a writer's life, you find secrets. That's the biographer's challenge."

At last week's sessions, Stavans confides, one of Singer's secretaries "told me that at one point when he was a young man in Poland, he was - so he told her - a gigolo of sorts, and there was a woman who would bring to his room married Jewish women for their enjoyment."

The discoveries about Singer inflame persistent arguments about his work. Did his highly accessible, highly sexual, idiosyncratic mix of Eastern European folklore - full of supernatural demons and dybbuks and frenzied primitive emotion - really deserve the Nobel Prize? Did the Swedish Academy slight better Yiddish writers?

Stavans formulates two key questions this way: "Is he an authentic writer? Is he representing Eastern Europe accurately?" Stavans' short answer is: Yes, he's authentic, if that means true to his own vision, rather than a mirror of the Polish-Jewish world he left: "I don't think you can go to Singer and understand Eastern Europe in a nutshell... . He's not a historical novelist."

The issue of Singer's worthiness for the Nobel arose again in a recent New York Times article. Throughout it, the widow of Chaim Grade, another fine Yiddish writer, led an orchestrated chorus of scholarly voices suggesting the wrong man won.

Stavans disagrees. "No, I would reject that. I think that Singer deserved the prize... . I think [the controversy] has to do with envy for the success that he achieved."

In Stavans' view, some peers vaunted by scholars as superior to Singer were more self-consciously literary, while Singer "comes to us in a crystalline way, straightforwardly.He saw himself as an entertainer. He reinvigorated the whole Yiddish and Jewish literary tradition."

At the same time, Stavans acknowledges that Singer, the "ultimate immigrant," aggressively remade himself for America, in part by granting an astonishing number of interviews that helped popularize the format among literary authors.

"He was an entrepreneur of culture," says Stavans. "He knew how to sell himself... . He didn't sit in his office quietly waiting for people to come. Is that bad? I don't think so."

Indeed, Stavans says that as a fellow immigrant who had to adapt himself to the United States and a new language when he came here in 1985, he finds Singer's everyday efforts to remake himself moving.

Stavans suggests that Singer's reverent fans, like all who confront posthumous biographical surprises about a hero, will have to accept that their idol wasn't quite the noble literary mensch they thought.

Or, as they say in Yiddish, the language of this critic's mother as well, Ven di bobbeh volt gehat a bord, volt zi geven a zaideh. ("If your grandmother had a beard, she'd be your grandfather.").