I.B. Singer and the Missing Glorious Martyrdom

[rymenhild]

A recent NYT article on the Yiddish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer explores reasons why Singer might not be the greatest of Yiddish writers. These reasons seem to have less to do with Singer’s writing style than his perceived self-indulgence at a time when other authors were suffering gloriously:

"When Abraham Sutzkever was starving, fighting Nazis with the partisans in the Lithuanian woods and writing great Yiddish poetry about the tragic fate of the Jews on fragments of bark, Singer was eating cheese blintzes at Famous Dairy Restaurant on 72nd Street and thinking about Polish whores and Yiddish devils," said Allan Nadler, director of Jewish Studies at Drew University and former director of research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

I have not studied the literature of the twentieth-century Yiddish renaissance in depth, but I have trouble believing in such a clear dichotomy between thoughtlessly hedonistic texts written in safety in America and selfless, noble works produced by future martyrs. Did Sutzkever never write about sex? Did Sutzkever actually suffer? What about the other poets of the Vilna ghetto? Did their work exist in a sexless world focused solely on the dark doom facing the ghetto-dwellers? What little I know about these writers, from the historical fiction of strange_selkie, suggests that they, too, could be self-indulgent before they achieved canonicity through their glorious deaths. (Did all of them even achieve canonicity, I wonder? Selkie, do the world a favor and translate and publish the writings of Gellerman and Markiewicz; the world clearly needs to read them.)

In any case, I really don’t think Singer deserves to lose his honored place in literature just because he had the misfortune to get out of Europe before he could be sainted.

Comments

Haskalah! (Gesundheit.)

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

('Haskalah' is the aforementioed Yiddish renaissance.)

It seems to be an ouroborous sort of article, you know, fangs deep in its own tail? The writers the American Yiddish-speaking community has chosen to venerate -- or at least bring up in the NY Times -- are not particularly illuminating choices to set agaist Singer.

Abraham Sutzkevyer did not write about sex, golems or anything so interesting. This is true. He was interned in the Vilna Ghetto, spent some years as a partisan, and lived the life of a media darling after the war. He edited the Yiddish literary joural 'Di Goldene Keyt', a publication of extreme moral pedigree. And he didn't suffer quite as much as implied, out there in the forests of the night; he was pretty much a media darling straight through, because he was young, slightly handsome, and he lived. His poetry, taken as if he was a poet in a writer's workshop anywhere in this country, lacks any real grace of emotion or sound. If he had not been so adept at self-promotion, I really doubt he'd be read in the modern world.

Jacob Glatstein is also mentioned. It's not fair to compare him to Singer; it's like holding T.S. Eliot up to Langston Hughes. Glatstein and Singer had phenomenally different bodies of work, written for two divergent audiences, with plain old different goals in writing. Glatstein was one of the prominents of the Inzikhist -- Self-Examining -- movement; he wrote for self, not community, and he was devoted to the expression of his own emotions, not telling tales meant to enliven and entertain a broad group. His poems have a lot of 'I' in them. Glatstein is called a Holocaust poet, but he was not in Europe during the Second World War. He emigrated to New York in 1914 and took up law; he wrote poems that happened to be about the Holocaust and in Yiddish, but his vantage point was a safe one. If he was hungry in 1943, it's because he didn't make it to the Automat on time. It's not right, it's not accurate, to make him an Essential Writer of the Eastern European Jewish Experience, because, uhm, he missed it.

I am in a unique position as regards the literary legacy of Chaim Grade; I have always been excruciatingly aware of it. Let's leave it at that. Grade made strong written contributions to American Yiddish culture, and he was one of the postwar Voices of American Judaism. But Singer was not writing to outshine him. No, they were not friends. But neither were they rivals, as the article implied. They just wrote at cross-purposes.

Now, then, Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is celebrated not because his works are morally commendable, or because he is the shining example of a particular movement. People love his stories. He wrote rich, organic stuff with the passion still in it, the secret tales of a whole other world. That world vanished, but it was beloved of those who remembered it, and so he became beloved. Singer was not a martyr or a paragon. He was a writer who succeeded at what he wanted to do: bring people their own stories back, show them their roots. Roots are generally gnarled, smudged and down to earth, but they're damned useful for understanding where you'll grow.

I have to shoot down the article's notion that writers who died during the Holocaust are somehow, by their deaths, better writers or better ethical, spiritual beings. Come on! These were people with a kaleidoscope of life experiences. They drank, smoked and believed in ghosts. Dybbuks and golems were their delicious shivery thrills while the bottle of booze got passed around. They made love; they had sex. They knew that glances and innuendo and breasts existed. They did everything, and they wrote about all of it. They wrote things that were imperfect, organic, frenetic. Go read Mordecai Gebirtig, who wrote one continuous passionate cry to Heaven, whose love for people, for his shtetl, touched everything he put on paper; go read Janusz Korczak, whose martyrdom shines out like diamonds, but who wrote really funny, sympathetic children's books before that. They were some of Singer's true contemporaries.

Before they died, Raissa Gellerman and her girlfriend were working on a stage adaptation of Singer's 'Gimpel the Fool'.

The martyrs loved him, too.

Re: Haskalah! (Gesundheit.)

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, so: we've established this is important. Now make this an article and then publish it, being as you are in pretty much sole possession of the Gellerman papers and all that. Besides, it will give me a good excuse to buy copies of something in which you have work.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/poetry.htm by the way. If you can read Hebrew alphabet, you can draw your own lit-crit conclusions.

And I see so many typos in my little rant above; I'm sorry. I wrote it really early this morning.

[a-trick-mind.livejournal.com]

Conversely, who knows the depths of suffering a person might experience, even while living "the good life." Must one face death to understand or comment on life?

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

I admit to knowing little to nothing about Yiddish literature, and not so much about Singer as a person, either. But I did always think that the greatness of an artist could only be judged by the quality of their work, not by their greatness as a person or their circumstances. That these factors often fail to line up has lead to some art of great poingancy itself.

[navelofwine.livejournal.com]

"When Abraham Sutzkever was starving, fighting Nazis with the partisans in the Lithuanian woods and writing great Yiddish poetry about the tragic fate of the Jews on fragments of bark, Singer was eating cheese blintzes at Famous Dairy Restaurant on 72nd Street..."

I miss that restaurant.

(Sorry, you guys already made all the worthwhile comments.)