Part 1 Introductory Remarks
Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1978,
Isaac Bashevis Singer or Yitzhok Bashevis is arguably the most
well-known Yiddish novelist in the world, but, of course, he is known to most
readers only through translations into English and other main languages. He may be, indeed, the only major author
whose work is loved and studied more in translation than in the original, and
in translations that to a great extent wash out the very distinctiveness of Yiddeshkyt
as a civilization and Judaism as a religion.
Seth Wolitz puts it rather bluntly[1]
The
English versions are generally shortened, often shorn of much description and
religious matter, and their perspectives and denouements are altered
significantly….they obscure—if they do not entirely eclipse—the original
Yiddish creation and the uniquely Jewish culture it elaborates and interprets.[2]
Nevertheless, given the constraints of working
with the standard translation by Jacob Sloan, we will attempt to discuss Satan
in Goray as a major modern work of European fiction. Singer himself thanks Sloan for “translating
a work which many considered untranslatable,”[3] a
judgment which may not be as true now as it was in 1955. Written ten years after World War II and the
destruction of Yiddishkeyt—Jewish civilization in Europe—this novel is a
strange, mystical account of Poland in the late seventeenth century, after the
great churban or disaster of Bogdan Chmelinicki’s Cossack Uprising, a
massacre of Jews not exceeded until the Nazi Holocaust, and in the midst of the
world-wide collective delusion of Shabbateanism. Thus Singer at once creates an historical
novel, a powerful depiction of Jewish fears and spiritual crisis at the opening
of the Modern Period and, at the same time, responds to the overwhelming,
virtually inexpressible horrors of the Shoah with a fantastic image of a
world gone mad.
Just listen to the opening paragraph of the
novel—in translation, of course—to see how Singer moves from general history to
the special focus on the town of Goray, the subject of his fantastic narrative:
In the
year 1648 the wicked Ukrainian hetman, Bogdan Chmelicki, and his followers
besieged the city of Zamosć but could not take it, because it was strongly
fortified; the rebelling haidamak peasants moved on to spread havoc in
Tomaszów, Bilgoraj, Kraśnik, Turbin, Frampol—and in Goray, too, the town that
lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world. They slaughtered on every hand, flayed men alive,
murdered small children, violated women and afterward ripped open their bellies
and sewed cats inside. Many fled to Lublin
The description becomes more and more focused,
and the extent of the devastation more and more appalling, so that the
traumatic experiences of the survivors from Goray and other towns and cities
like it can become the base for all other events in the novel.
The
market place, to which peasants from everywhere came for the fair, was
overgrown with weeds, the prayer house and the study house were filled with
dung left by the horses that the soldiers had stabled there. Most of the houses had been levelled by
fire. For weeks after the razing of
Goray, the corpses lay neglected in every street, with no one to bury
them. Savage dogs tugged on dismembered limbs,
and vultures and crows fed on human flesh.
The handful who survived left the town and wandered away. It seemed as though Goray had been erased
forever. (p. 1)
There
are two little clues in this opening paragraph of the text which suggest that
the kind of history recounted here is not purely objective or limited by
documentary sources. First, the narrator
designates the shtetl, or rural village with a high proportion of Jewish
residents, named Goray as “the town that lay in the midst of the hills at the
end of the world.” This begins to
suggest a certain exemplary, mythical quality to the place; not that it is
unreal, but that it is surreal, more than ordinary by the very quality of its
exemplariness. The second indicator of
something special comes when the narrator says, “It seemed as though Goray had
been erased forever.” This “seemingness”
points towards an illusion which will, not so much be disabused by the
following pages of narration, but rather will be the very subject of the
novelist’s particular concerns. As we
shall try to show later, there is something very traditional—or perhaps we
should say “unmodern”—about such a historical perspective. Something is also particularly Jewish, though
that too remains to be seen.
Unlike the more familiar Yiddish stories and
novels of Sholom Aleichem, perhaps best known through the musical version of Fiddler
on the Roof, Singer’s stories and novels of shtetl life in Eastern
Europe tend to avoid the sentimental, the romantic, and the idealized. This was a life he knew, often personally,
growing up in the 1920s as the son of a Hasidic rabbi from the hinterlands of
Poland in a crowded flat in a poor and crowded Jewish neighbourhood of
Warsaw. “His curls of fiery red hung
down from under his round velvet cap which he wore with a long satin coat.”[5] But
though he studied for seven years in a traditional yeshiva, he came under the
strong influence of modernizing and westernizing trends, and like his older
brother and his sister, left the Old World for the New and, also like them,
began a literary career in America. Even
before the Holocaust destroyed that dynamic civilization of Yiddeshkeyt,
Singer, along with other refugees, helped to rescue it and transplant its
remnants to the United States.
This East European civilization was on the cusp
of modernity, partly steeped in the folklore and traditionalism of the medieval
past still alive in the little market towns and villages of Poland, Hungary and
Romania, but also partly secular and enlightened in urban centres, like Warsaw,
Lublin, Budapest and Bucharest. Caught
in this “quandary”, Yitzhok Bashevis was, along with Abraham Goldfadn,
Esther-Rokhl Kaminska, Marc Chagall, Ida Rubenstein and scores of others, according
to Wolitz, “riven by conflicting emotions over the Enlightenment and wrenched
between the choices of rejecting a world of rigid traditionalism or embracing
the new secular Yiddish culture with its lack of a meaningful spiritual
compass.” In fact, it is now clear to
histoirians that almost all that was envisaged by the Yiddish writers at the
end of the nineteenth century was a creation of their own, a distorted memory
of the people and places that was already transformed by the coming of railways
and the political turmoil of the period.
However, even the most fantastic images of nostalgia generated by these
authors are not quite the same in quality as the laterm production seen in the
stage shows and Hollywood films after World War II, in the shock of the
Holocaust. Before that tremendous,
unimaginable trauma was experienced, the role of a romanticized memory of the
Eastern Europe served as an intellectual space in which Jews, increasingly
threatened by what would later be recognized as total annihilation, were able
to work out, in a somewhat controlled atmosphere, the questions of their
identity as distinct from other modernizing national groups. Clearly, then, Singer’s novels and short
stories do not attempt what Shalom Aleichem, Goldfadn and the rest
attempted—and we have to remind ourselves, too, that they were educated,
sophisticated Mid-Europeans, not actually shtetlniks
themselves, and that for many Yiddish was a learned language not really
their Mamloshen. But in a certain way, Singer’s fictions
assume that American readers are aware both of the idealized version of their
backgrounds as filtered through theatre, fiction and even stand-up comedians’
spiels and of the Shoah which put paid to the reality of Ashkenazi culture in
Europe. His books play with that
double-perspective, awkward and uncomfortable as it must have seemed to him, in
order to tease out something else from the audience.
That something else includes, as modern
scholarship has been able to see, shows that Singer also drew from Polish
Gentile folklore and literature. Thus,
in Wolitz’s words,
Bashevis moved dramatically across the
literary spectrum from harsh realism to the fantastic, tapping the Ashkenazic
Id, as it were, fearlessly uncovering unholy dreams and profane
desires…Bashevis represents the last major resistant generation of strictly
religious Polish Jewry dipping its feet for the first time into modernity.
When he did this, however, Singer was pursuing
a private agenda, and incorporating it into his cultural role as a memorializer
of the “the world we have lost” and the experiences of being an immigrant in
the New World.
Bashevis, who took his pen-name from his
mother, Bathsheba, wrote all his work originally in Yiddish and published his
fiction, usually in serial form, in the New York Yiddish newspaper Der
Forwarts. As we have indicated, he
does not seek to present his readers with a simplistic nostalgic look at the
culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews destroyed in the Nazi Holocaust. Instead, he seeks to re-create in his
fictions—and using the techniques and insights of the most advanced modern
literary traditions in western literature—that which has always lay hidden in
the folklore and romantic imagery.
But by presenting what he believed to be the
real essence of that Yiddishkeyt, with all its closed, unsavoury, and
superstitious elements, Singer was often vilified by critics and ordinary
readers who wanted to hold on to the nostalgic glow that was all that seemed to
remain after the Holocaust. Yet many
critics mistakenly have taken Singer’s translated texts as too authoritative
and thus missed out on the deepest levels of his depiction of the folklore,
superstitions, and anxiety-ridden experiences of East European Jews, just as
they have seemed to miss out the powerful forces of learning and rationalism
that were sorely tested between the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century through
the pogroms of the late nineteenth and the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi
persecutions and murders.
Yiddish prose writers in this period, too, were
not merely sentimentalists and nostalgic deniers of the ordeal of
modernity—they were, in fact, the vehicle in which the ordeal could be
conceived and driven. Yiddish the
language and Yiddish the civilization it embodied, since the real people who
were there were no gone or traumatized beyond real remembering, were, as they
had always been, as the means by which Jewish intellectuals and artists sought
to engage with the modern world without abandoning their Judaism or their
Jewish communities.[6] They were implicated in the search for and
then the preservation at least of the memory of the folklore of the Yiddish-speaking
Jewish world. After the destruction of
European Yiddish civilization, Isaac Bashevis Singer could only write with what
Wolitz calls a nouveau frisson, a sense of the frightening and seductive
uncanniness of the world he and all other Ashkenazi Jews had just lost.
By the
skill of his pen [writes Wolitz], he pulled into the foreground of his fiction
the lurking memories, fears, and lusts quivering behind this new Westernizing
culture, determined to remind it of its historical uniqueness, moral concerns,
and precarious reality.
With
so many millions dead and the whole physical base of the culture destroyed, the
survivors could only cling to their language in fragments and their traumatized
memories in confused wisps of guilt, regret and intense grief. Wolitz poignantly observes: “Yiddish culture,
utterly laid waste by genocide after World War II, experienced a last flicker
of creativity in New York, in Buenos Aires, and finally in Israel.” Could his original Yiddish-speaking audience
appreciate the experimental and shocking novel called Satan in Goray?
Could
Singer’s later non-Yiddish-speaking and even non-Jewish audience understand the
“untranslatable” text and need they be permitted only to see Sloan’s English
version? What about the other
generations of Americans who knew Yiddish only as a broken illusion filtered
through Catskill Mountain and vaudeville (and later television) shtiks and the barely speakable words of
survivors? And those in our own later
generation who are increasingly cut off from anything but literary
reproductions, purportedly historical and manifestly fictional, as well as the
ambiguous zone of would be witness writings that have been confused by decades
of silence and novelistic dominance?
NOTES
[1] Seth Wolitz , “Introduction” to The Hidden Isaac
Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth Wolitz
(University of Texas Press, 2002) online at http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/exwolhid.
[2] Isaac B. Singer, Headnote to Satan in Goray trans. By Jacob Sloan (New York: Avon Books/
Ferrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955) p. 5 (unnumbered). All citations are from this edition.
[5] Anonymous, “Isaac Bashevis Singer,” It Happened in History online
at http://www. amsaw.org/
amsaw-ithappenedinhistory-071403-singer.
[6] Alyssa Quint, “A Palimpsest of Literature and Politics: How One Century
Tested the Possibilities of Yiddish Culture”, review essay of Mikhail Kritikov,
Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 and Mikhail
Krutikov and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Yiddish and the Left: Papers of the
Third Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish in Forward (1
August 2003) available online at http://www.forward.com/issues/
2003/03.08.01/arts3.
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