Isaac B. Singer: A Life - Hardcover

Florence Noiville is a journalist and literary critic for Le Monde. She has written books on Greek and Roman mythology and a biography of Paul Faucher.

 
“A Stronghold of Jewish Puritanism”
 
The locket-size photo dates from 1926; it is one of the oldest known photographs of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Isaac is twenty-two years old, and he still has some hair, though he won’t for very long. He is a thin, fair-skinned redhead whose ears stick way out. The expression in his eyes is beguiling, almost bewitching. His pale, transparent blue eyes seem to gaze inward. One can almost imagine the four-year-old boy who was taught to read with the Pentateuch and almost recognize the face of the future Nobel Prize winner. Incredulity, bafflement: the gaze is simultaneously straightforward and helpless. It is the gaze of a tormented dreamer, a gaze Singer retained all his life, as if his father’s words on the Kabbalah still echoed in his ears: “It is not a simple matter, not simple at all. The world is filled with mysteries, everything happens according to its decree, everything contains the secret of secrets . . .”1
 
This photo is strangely symbolic. It dates from the same period when Singer published his first writings. Everything prior to that time—childhood scenes, family albums—has disappeared. We will never know what Isaac looked like as a little boy or as an adolescent. The first time we see his face it is already the face of a younger writer, as if everything that came before—life without fiction—was not worth disclosing. As if he wanted to tell us that his true personality was inseparable from the works behind which he so often hid. The war spared that particular photo by chance, but Singer never believed in chance. The fact that his face is revealed to us for the first time just as he was emerging as a writer is a fitting place to begin his story.
 
The opening sentence could be Alfred Jarry’s grim statement about Ubu Roi: “The action takes place in Poland, that is to say, nowhere.” This is true even in geographical terms, for, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Poland was divided and under the iron rule of three empires, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. “Nowhere” could be used to describe Singer’s native village, too, for today, more than a hundred years after his birth, every last trace of Jewish life has been meticulously obliterated from the landscape. The Poland of Singer’s birth is nowhere in human memory. All the eyewitnesses to his 1904 birth have died. If they were still alive today, they would be 110 or 115 years old, assuming they had managed to flee Poland before the Second World War or were among the roughly 120,000 Jews—of the country’s original population of three million prior to 1939—who survived the Holocaust.2
 
The only way, then, to reconstruct Isaac’s first years is to trust his own recollections. Fortunately, these were unusually precocious and vivid. Isaac always claimed to remember events that had taken place when he was three or even two and a half years old. One day when he referred to his native village of Leoncin, by the sandy banks of the Vistula near Nowy Dwór, his mother was amazed. Isaac was only four years old when the Singer family had left Leoncin. How could he possibly remember anything? Singer described the inhabitants and the houses with such a wealth of detail that she was rendered speechless. He could even recall the villagers’ names. His mother couldn’t believe her ears. The boy was a prodigy. She didn’t know that this ability to remember would inform his entire life, that he would constantly relive, polish, and transform his recollections, and that when his memory betrayed him, he would die.
 
Yet these extraordinary memories are accompanied by strange areas of darkness, starting with his date of birth. Was Singer born on July 14, 1904, as he often claimed? This is far from certain. He seems to have made up the date. For a novelist to start his life with a fiction is very fitting. Here is how he explained it later: “At our house, we never celebrated birthdays. One day, at the heder, a little schoolmate said to me, ‘Today’s my birthday, I’m going to receive gifts.’ I went home and, furious, asked my mother, ‘What about me, when is my birthday? Why don’t we ever celebrate it?’ Sensing how upset I was, to make me happy my mother answered, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, it’s today.’ The day was July 14, obviously not the real date, but I decided that would be it from then on.”3
 
We will probably never know the real date. In Poland, all the relevant archives have disappeared. Singer’s birth certificate is nowhere to be found. Was it destroyed during the First World War, or was it burned during the Second World War? Very few official registries of the Jewish communities remain. After 1945, some were found in the midst of ruins or buried in heaps of rubbish. Occasionally, villagers brought the schoolteacher papers covered with writing they couldn’t decipher. More often, these documents were used as wrapping paper. In the countryside, herring was wrapped in the Torah.
 
A trip to Singer’s birthplace today is hardly more fruitful. You cross fragrant mossy pine forests and fields still harvested with scythes before reaching Leoncin, about twenty miles northwest of Warsaw. The village stretches along a drab main road, the Street of the Partisans. Not a trace of its former Jewish life remains. The only people you encounter are children and a few men on bicycles with bottles of beer sticking out of their pockets. Today the house where Singer was born is gone; all that remains is an orchard. Across from the town hall, though, a dead-end alley bears the name of Isaac Bashevis Singer. But the graffiti—two stars of David—render the street sign almost illegible. Clearly, Leoncin’s inhabitants have no particular desire to honor the great man’s memory. No one talks about him; no one remembers him; the silence is deafening. The proposal that the village school be named after him was ignored. Isaac Bashevis Singer Street boasts not a single house; the inhabitants of Leoncin all refused to have a “Jewish address.”4
 
A FAMILY OF RABBIS AND WRITERS
 
Since there are no independent sources, the best way to imagine the setting of those early years is through the autobiographical writings of the Singer children. In the Singer family—as in the Corneille and Brontë families—all the brothers and sisters were writers, or at least attracted to writing. Both Isaac’s older brother, Israel Joshua, and his sister, Hinde Esther, recorded their memories of that vanished world. In Of a World That Is No More, Israel Joshua describes the shtetl’s wooden houses, its sandy roads, the figurine of Puss-in-Boots in the tobacconist’s shop window.5 These recollections are supplemented by those of Hinde Esther, who later became Esther Kreitman, in her memoir The Dance of Demons.6 At the time, Leoncin had a population of two hundred, Jews and non-Jews, who all lived in great poverty but sent their children to the same school and seemed to have coexisted peacefully.
 
By the time the third child was born, Isaac—Yitskhok, in Yiddish, or Itshele, in the affectionate diminutive—the Singer family had been living in Poland for generations. Four hundred years earlier, in the sixteenth century, that land had become, as the historian Pierre Chanu calls it, the “Far West (in the East) for mistreated Jews . . . For Ashkenazi Jews, the center of gravity moved a thousand kilometers to the East, from the Rhine valley to the Jerusalem on the Polish and Lithuanian borders.”7 The family names still bear the traces of this massive...