I.B. Singer and the Missing Glorious Martyrdom

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.