To E. Dickinson in Heaven So Emily, tell me what is it— that so finally kindly stops us— Is it the heart at last saying yes to cholesterol to blockage in the ascending aorta? The not wholly chromed bumper slapping our bones as quick as children changing their minds among swings slides and jungle gyms? Or is it the life that passes before our eyes as the gas hisses from the shower head the knife tears, the bear spreads his arms, the lover enters the half circle of our vision? Let me know. Sincerely, John Guzlowski

 

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Isaac Singer and the Threat of America

Reprinted by permssion from Shofar, Spring, 2003

I

n his 1943 essay "Problems of Yiddish Prose in America," Isaac Singer discusses the difficulty—if not the impossibility—Yiddish writers face in writing about life here. One of the major problems has to do with the words they use. Yiddish words have "too much tradition"; they resonate with the flavor and timbre of the Old World. American words, conversely, "reek of foreignness, of cheap glitter, of impermanence." The result is that the "better" Yiddish writers here "avoid treating American life, and they are subjectively (aesthetically) right to do so." To make his point absolutely clear, Singer declares, "Through his language, the Yiddish writer is bound to the past. His boundaries are, spatially, the borders of Poland, Russia and Rumania, and, temporally, the date of his departure for America. Here he must, in a literary sense, dine on leftovers; only food prepared in the old world can nourish him in the new" (9).

That Singer is such a writer, at least in the popular imagination, seems unarguable. He is best known for fiction set in the past and in the distant, often mythic regions of Eastern Europe. Writing about his involvement with Poland and its past, Agata Tuszynska states in her book on Singer and Poland, "He lived longer in New York, than he lived in Poland, but…. His permanent address remained in Poland. He wore the past like an overcoat, whatever the season" (6). Likewise, Clive Sinclair in his book on Isaac and Israel Singer says, "America never dominated the imagination of the Singer Brothers, as it had the generation of immigrants that preceded them" (56).

As Janet Hadda remarks in her biography of him, however, this popular image of Isaac Singer as living in a "timeless Shtetl" is far from the truth. America is a significant element in a number of his novels, a point Leslie Fiedler speaks to in his 1981 essay "Isaac Bashevis Singer: or, the American-ness of the American-Jewish Writer." At the time Fiedler wrote his essay, however, only one of Singer's novels about America had been published in English: Enemies, A Love Story. Since then, it has been joined by The Penitent (1983) and the posthumously published Meshugah (1994) and Shadows on the Hudson (1998). It seems time, therefore, to examine Singer's American novels.

In his essay, Fiedler speculates about the "American-ness" of Singer: Is he Jewish-American, American Jewish, and how is he to be regarded: as an immigrant, a refugee, or an émigré? When he finally addresses the question, Fiedler's answer is not tentative: Singer's American-ness is "Minimal, I am tempted to say…almost nonexistent: an American-ness degree zero" (77). But he does not stop there. He finds that Singer's America is centered in Manhattan and boarded by Coney Island and the resorts of the Catskills. And the figures Singer populates this landscape with are his doubles: Yiddish writers lost in this "claustrophobic enclave" (77) with hardly any contact with "white American goyim" (79). His lost souls inhabit an America, Fiedler feels, that is a "Limbo: a twilight landscape in which they can haunt only each other, being imperceptible to the wide-awake inhabitants of daylight America" (80). Although Fiedler's interpretation is in some ways applicable to parts of Enemies with its lost and scarred survivors and to such stories as "The Séance" and "Wedding in Brownsville," it does not address the fullness of all that Singer has to say about America. In this essay, therefore, I will offer some possible points to consider in talking about Singer and America and its effect on Jews.

America appears in several of Singer's novels about Poland, most notably perhaps in The Manor, but in such novels, his interest is elsewhere; and the reader gets only a quick, tourist's glimpse of the new world, much like Clara Jacoby's view of America in that novel. Shadows on the Hudson is Singer's first full treatment of America. Although published in English in 1998, this novel predates Enemies, The Penitent, and Meshugah because it was serialized in Yiddish in The Forward between January 1957 and January 1958. In Shadows the American landscape Singer describes is—as Fiedler says of the landscape in Enemies—"narrow" (77), focusing primarily on New York City. But it is not the "Limbo" he says it is. Admittedly, Singer's Jewish characters do not affect "the wide-awake inhabitants of daylight America," but these Jewish characters are aware of and eafected by the Americans they come in contact with.

Shadows, an ensemble novel set in the late 1940's, focuses on a group of survivors (Hertz Grein, Boris Makaver, his daughter Anna are the major ones) attempting to reconstruct their lives in America. This work is somewhat surprising given that Singer's own experiences as a refugee in America—as he describes them in Lost in America—seem difficult but not impossible. The overall impression of America he offers in that memoir is fairly balanced, not unlike that of other writers from Poland, according to Adamczyk-Garbowska's study of "Polish Writers' Perceptions of America." Shadows, however, is unforgiving in its condemnation of American society, of America's effect on Jews, and of assimilation.

One of the central complaints about America in Shadows is that it is an idolatrous nation. Early, Singer describes Professor Shrage crossing a Manhattan street. As he looks at the drivers, his thoughts link America with Sodom and Gehenna: "These were not people hurrying to get home but the wicked inhabitants of Sodom … whirling themselves around in the Sling of Gehenna" (57-58). The idols that America worships are materialism, sex, and violence. Boris Makaver's daughter Anna—with her business acumen and love of comfort—represents the voice of materialism in Shadows. At one point, her husband says, "She's become an American. There's only one love here—love of the dollar" (253). In fact, she, unlike Shrage, Grein, and Dr. Margolin, feels at home in New York with its shop windows displaying the materialistic culture waiting for those with money. Glancing at them, she thinks, "America is a blessed country." For Anna, this blessedness has nothing to do with spiritual values; rather it derives from "the costly goods on display" in those windows and the people who work "devising new charms . . . to entice customers, in exactly the same way as flowers decked themselves out in every imaginable color to attract the bees that pollinated them." Her thoughts have turned from "goods on display" to sex, which for her seems a natural progression, for as she says, "Everything was sex" (343).

This belief is borne out in Shadows, as the reader hears its characters remark frequently on the obsessive sexuality of America, often linking this sexuality to violence and materialism. In one of several panoramic descriptions of New York, Grein compares the city to the capitals of the pagan world. Billboards display the idols of the culture: "raging murderers, naked whores." In restaurant windows men stand like high priests roasting meat while "cacophonous music" mixes with "screams of lust and the shrieks of the tortured." Over this entire scene presides a gigantic image of a woman painted on the side of a building. In its doorways her "hirelings" urge passersby to enter. The sentence which ends this scene confirms the sense of an idolatrous, bacchanalian orgy: "The air stank of smoke and slag, of booze and burning" (68).

A former teacher in a Talmud Torah who has abandoned his teaching, Grein often reflects on the hard impact this idolatrous culture has had on Jews. When asked why he no longer teaches, he says children reflect the values of the culture around them, and he has seen what these values are. The children attend their religious schools, he says, but they learn nothing "because the Torah isn't in tune with baseball and the filth they hear all night on the radio" (185). The "spiritual fathers" of these children are "stock Hollywood characters," and the literature these children read is all "trashy novels and the tabloid press" (90). What the children learn from these spiritual American fathers is to reject their Jewishness. This younger generation in Shadows—Anna, her cousin Herman, and Grein's children Jack and Anita—have forsaken their faith. Wondering what kind of Jews these children will be, Grein says, "When one removed the Jew's faith, precious little that was Jewish remained, and even less that bound all these modern Jews together. Even if they themselves did not assimilate, their children did. What kind of generation . . . would his Jack and Anita bring up? A Jew without God is a Gentile " (150).

And Gentiles in the novel, because they have created the idolatrous culture in which the Jews find themselves, are completely suspect. Speaking of the American culture of violence, evil, and "ugly deeds," Grein says, "Christianity is . . . complicit with this modern culture" (443). Often in the novel, Gentiles are seen as hypocrites who break the Ten Commandments, as violent anti-Semites who have "slaughtered and burned Jews" for 2,000 years, and as people whose indifference allowed the Holocaust to happen. When a Jewish artist tells Boris's wife Frieda he is converting to Christianity, she says, when "the Nazis exterminated six million Jews . . . the Christians were silent. The murderers carried out the slaughter and the priests looked on" (536).

A fear shared by many of the novel’s characters is that the "all-pervasive" Gentile influence is seducing the Jews not only into acceptance of the Gentile culture but also into active participation in the maintenance and control of this culture. Grein makes this point strongly as he reflects on the nature of popular culture. Wondering what has happened to Jews in America, he is amazed that for 3000 years they had been able to resist idolatry and "now suddenly they had become the foremost producers in Hollywood, the major publishers of newspapers.... Everywhere Jews have become the preachers of atheism, the arbiters of fashion, the writers of slander; they took the lead as political agitators and avidly fed the evil inclinations in all people. Now they had taken the role of teaching the Gentiles how to enjoy the pleasure of this world" (222-23). This movement to embrace Gentile culture is also finally a movement toward collaboration with Nazism. Talking to Dr. Margolin about how Jews have "become Men of Sodom" because of their "pursuit of Gentile culture," Grein links assimilation to Nazism. Following his statement about how his grandchildren will be Gentiles, he says, "We've been in league with our murderers. Directly and indirectly we're allies of the Nazis " (447).

Grein does not believe this movement toward assimilation and Nazism can be reversed. Near the novel's end, he reasons that he "has snapped the chain of generations," that he has cut himself off from the heritage that started with Abraham; and in doing so, he has cut his children off from this heritage. Asking himself how all of this came about so quickly, he answers,

If the garden is not tended — to mix metaphors — the spark of Jewishness dies.

Grein's remarks seem somewhat ironic at first. Although he often says he has lost his faith and is no longer a Jew, and although he also seems dedicated to the materialistic and sexually-oriented culture he finds in America (as his obsession with Anna and her business deals suggests), his faith and Jewishness grow stronger as the novel progresses. This Jewishness at the novel's end, however, is the "extreme" Jewishness Singer writes of in his essay on Hasidic Jews, a Jewishness that demands total separation from American culture. Accordingly, Grein cuts himself off completely from the "underworld" culture of America with its Gentile-aping Jews; its "idolatry, adultery, and bloodshed"; its assimilationists who flirt with Nazism. As he says,

For Grein and other characters in the novel, America is the "underworld" with all that this word suggests in terms of pagan idolatry, hell, and the immorality of gangsterdom.

Thirteen years after the serialization of Shadows, Singer published Enemies, A Love Story, a novel dealing with Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor living in New York, and his comic and tragic relations with his three wives. Although the novel is very critical of American culture and its effect on Jews, the focus of this discussion is somewhat different. The talk of America's idolatrous culture is replaced by a discussion of American freedom and its promise; and the tone of this discussion is also different, subtler, less diatribic.

In Enemies as in Shadows, Singer frequently describes various "panoramic" cityscapes as a way of providing a focus for a character's thoughts on America. Singer is especially intent on describing Herman's responses to Coney Island and the subway. In the first extended description of the amusement area, Singer suggests the possibilities of America. Apparently, there is food, pleasure, and freedom in abundance:

Herman's comments following this description suggest his views on Coney Island in particular and America in general: "The richness of color, the abundance, the freedom—cheap and shoddy as everything was" (21). Coney Island is like the melting ice cream: a fading promise.

The fading promise of Coney Island is more than that. It is the fading promise of America as well, a point Singer makes in his descriptions of the subways Herman takes. A hungry reader of the faces in the subways, he wants to understand the society he finds himself in; and what he comes to understand is that America is not the land of its visionary promise. In the faces he sees "dullness, greed, anxiety" and a primitiveness that suggests the failure of America's vision: "The low foreheads, the troubled gazes, the broad noses with large nostrils, the square chins, the full breasts and wide hips refuted all visions of Utopia." He believes evolution has failed work here and that at any moment this primitiveness may break into anti-Semitic violence: "The right bit of propaganda could rouse this group into a program-making rabble" (194).

A point Singer always comes back to in his descriptions of the subways is the one he makes at the end of that first Coney Island passage, that freedom here is as "cheap and shoddy as everything" else. Many of the passengers seem out of control. Herman cannot remember ever seeing "such wild faces" in Europe: "Here the young seemed dominated by lust for enjoyment rather than for mischief. The boys ran screeching, choking one another like rams" (21). Furthermore, feeling the masses of people pressing against him as they wait for a train, Herman feels there is no freedom: "An irresistible force shoved him into the car. Hips, breasts, elbows pressed against him. Here, at least, the illusion of free will had vanished. Here man was tossed about like a pebble or like a meteor in space" (84). The people he encounters appear to be victims of forces beyond their control.

This sort of pleasure-driven, wild, primitive, out-of-human-control landscape that the reader sees in the Coney Island and subway passages in Enemies is not uncommon in Singer's Eastern Europe fiction. We see very much the same thing in a number of his novels and short stories set there. A prime example is "The Gentleman from Cracow," a short story in which a town willfully allows itself to be controlled by its greed and lust. In that story, however, the town is pulled back from complete destruction through the efforts of the rabbi and the small community of good people who work with him.

The rabbi in Enemies, however, differs greatly from many of the rabbis of Singer's European fiction. Unlike the tradition-bound rabbis of novels like The Manor and Family Moskat, Rabbi Milton Lampert in Enemies is Singer's satire on a new kind of rabbi surfacing in America. His primary characteristic is that he is worldly rather than spiritual. He has hired Herman to ghost write his sermons because he lacks the patience to study sacred books. Instead, he follows the stock market, gambles, and spends his time satisfying his sensual desires and exercising his vanity. Just as he has made an accommodation to this new world, he tries to get Herman to enter fully into it. When he first appears, Lampert insists Herman get a phone so he can check-up on his work. Herman argues against this suggestion, "Anyone who's gone through all that I have is no longer a part of this world" (28). The Rabbi's response stresses the worldly:

Lampert's remarks recall the moments in Shadows where characters speak of their "complicity" (443) with the materialistic culture of America, the accommodations they have made to it.

Herman, however, feels American Jews perhaps have made too many accommodations to this new world.[1] He comes to understand this when he and his lover Masha stay at a Jewish resort on Lake Placid. Observing the Jews around him, he asks the question asked repeatedly in Singer's American novels, "What does their Jewishness consist of?" And Herman's answer is one Singer's characters in these novels frequently give: "They all had the same wish: to assimilate as quickly as possible" (107). And how Herman views assimilation is suggested in the passage in which he thinks about the training in Judaism that his Gentile wife Yadwiga receives from her neighbors: they "were waiting … to teach her the Judaism that remained from their mothers and grandmothers and which the years in America had diluted and distorted" (137).

In Enemies Singer reveals Herman's complaints about America and its effects on the Jews but the passages that do this—as compared to similar passages in Shadows—are relatively limited in number. Singer gives us Herman's attitudes toward the people on the subways in only four passages. Similarly, the moments when he complains about Jews being transformed by America are rare. Unlike Grein, Herman does not often extend his thoughts beyond his own immediate concerns. And finally the tone of his remarks is subtler. The "panoramic" critiques Grein and others voice in Shadows tend toward the Jeremiadic with their references to Sodom, Gehenna, and idolatry. Herman's remarks, on the other hand, are relatively restrained.

This changes in the following novel, The Penitent, almost every page of which talks about America and the Jews in a language more reminiscent of the earlier Shadows. Serialized in Yiddish in 1974 and first published in English in 1983, The Penitent focuses on Joseph Shapiro, a survivor who came to the America after the war. Although financially successful, he flees this country for Israel to join a group of traditionalist Hasidic Jews. This first-person novel describes his reasons for leaving and the life he finds in Israel. His overriding reason appears to be that America "swarm[s] with hate and evil theories" (52). It is a fallen world of the kind Wolfgang Kayser describes in The Grotesque in Art and Literature, a world where all reliable sources of meaning and order—identity, natural law, social law, and historical order—have become distorted, suspended, or destroyed (184-85). One of the complaints Shapiro voices throughout the novel deals with lawlessness in the America. In Enemies, Herman comments on the chaotic, reckless, uncontrolled behavior of youths on the subways; but Shapiro points repeatedly at the lawlessness of the entire American society. For example, he notes that the doorman of his apartment building is not at his post because he is probably playing cards with a policeman in the basement. This incident leads Shapiro into a Jeremiad concerning the law. He says, "You couldn't say a word about this because, for all the fine talk about democracy, law, and freedom," only one principle is followed here: "the principle of might makes right" (30-31).

The America Shapiro sees is a society that has been entirely turned upside down.[2] He makes this point on a number of occasions by reciting what he finds in a typical newspaper. One of the fullest examples of this occurs the morning he decides to leave both his mistress and his wife. As he sits in a restaurant he reads about "wars, glorification of revolution, murders, rapes, politicians' cynical promises, lying editorials, acclaim for stupid books, dirty plays and films." The paper, Shapiro notes, applauded "every possible kind of idolatry" while it "spat at truth" (37). Even the obituary page reveals this topsy-turvyness by being made "to seem optimistic," emphasizing the accomplishments of the dead, the size of their estate, and the number of trophy wives they had. As in Shadows, all of this American devotion to materialism, sex, violence, criminality, and "progress" (118) is an expression of the essential idolatry of American. In The Penitent as in the earlier novel, America is presented as a new Sodom (31) in which people have rejected God and replaced him with "every possible kind of idolatry" (37). Arguing with Priscilla about the Ten Commandments' injunction not to serve false idols, Shapiro sets forth a blanket condemnation of American idolatry:

Denouncing this idolatry, Shapiro makes clear that he wants to serve the God of the Torah and the Ten Commandments, not the American idols of death, faithlessness, and cruel victimization that demand we "build our happiness on the misfortune of another" (157). Elsewhere he states, "The slightest compromise that you make with the pagan culture of our time is a gesture toward evil, a nod to the world of murder, idolatry, and adultery" (112).

Some of the novel's most diatribic passages deal with the consequences of this adjustment to worldliness, to American society. In one of these, Shapiro says the modern Jew's desire to ape the Gentile is "directly contrary to the essence of Jewishness, which is to be as distant from the Gentile as it's possible to get." He then goes on to discuss the Diaspora and explains how the isolation it forced on the Jews saved them as a people. If they had not experienced it, he says, they would have been "annihilated forever." In arguing for isolation, he then speaks about Jews, assimilation, and conversion: "It's just one step from assimilation to conversion, and sometimes no more than a generation or two from conversion to Nazism" (91). The seriousness with which he makes this remark is indicated earlier in a passage describing a dream he had. In it he is dressed as a Nazi, and he feels that it's his "way of life" (27) that puts him in this uniform. The message is quite clear: Jewish assimilation into American culture and society breeds Nazism.

The way in which Shapiro links assimilation and Nazism differs, however, from the way in which Grein links the two in Shadows. In that novel Grein says that assimilated Jews will become Gentiles, and these Gentiles are "Directly and indirectly" "allies of the Nazis" (447). As I understand this statement, Grein fears that Jews will become immoral if they abandon their Jewishness. Right after making his remark about becoming "allies of the Nazis," he lists some of the sins he feels Jews who have become Gentiles commit: "Our daughters wander the streets like harlots. Our wives sit in bars, talk obscenities, and read pornography. They paint their faces like strumpets and they deck themselves out like tarts and demand that their husbands kill themselves to keep their wives in luxury" (447). The sins Grein associates with these "allies of the Nazis" are sins of the flesh, not sins of the Holocaust. Grein, I suspect, is being hyperbolic. Shapiro, however, as his dream of himself in a Nazi uniform suggests, is not. As a Jew moving quickly toward complete immersion into the excess of an idolatrous culture, Shapiro feels he is moving toward Nazism and everything it suggests.

What he advocates instead is fundamentally what Grein advocates in the earlier Shadows: an "extreme Jewishness" (Penitent 43) of isolation. Seeing some Yeshiva students in an airport, Shapiro judges them approvingly: "They have isolated themselves from the worldliness more than any other Jews in our history. They were exactly what Moses demanded: a holy people, guarded by a thousand restrictions, a people which 'shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations'" (93-94). Shapiro feels too many American Jews have forgotten this injunction. They are willing to compromise with a corrupt culture, and he speaks at the novel's end about orthodox colleges and universities in America that teach a little about how to be a Jew and a lot about how to be a Gentile. The theory behind this—according to Shapiro—is that this will help the students "to adjust to both worldliness and God." Contrary to what Rabbi Lampert says in Enemies, Shapiro believes the truth is that "once you are adjusted to the world, you can no longer be adjusted to God" (161).

The nature of American society and its effect on Jews continues to be an important theme in Singer's posthumously published Meshugah, serialized in Yiddish between April 1981 and February 1983, and first published in English in 1994. Coming after The Penitent, Meshugah—although also focusing on Holocaust survivors—is a very different novel. Instead of The Penitent's Jeremiad against American culture, the reader encounters a more balanced view of America, almost as if Singer—troubled by the response of such readers as Harold Bloom to The Penitent's negative portrayal of America—had decided to write a less virulent novel. A typical descriptive passage showing this shift in Singer's presentation of America occurs in the first chapter of Meshugah. Its narrator-protagonist Aaron Greidinger writes, "Outside it was May, and it was already too hot. But I imagined that together with the odor of gasoline and heated asphalt, I could smell the fragrance of spring wafting in from the East River " (10). This scene is a far cry from the bacchanalian streetscapes described by Grein in Shadows or Masha's statement in Enemies that "Even in the camps the air wasn't as polluted as it is here" (103).

Admittedly, Singer still allows his narrator to voice complaints. The most frequent is that America is mad, as the title Meshugah suggests. At one point Aaron's friend Max sighs and says, "Yes, this is New York—eternal bedlam" (28). But the statement does not carry the same imagistic force as Singer's earlier descriptions of the frenetic immorality and mindlessness of the Gentile culture of Shadows with its images of the idolatrous world. In fact, he turns the heat of his complaints down considerably by suggesting not only America but the whole world is mad. Aaron's lover Miriam, also a survivor, says to him, "We are a peculiar family. My father is a maniac. My mother is muddleheaded, and my brother, Manes, was not quite right in his head . . . It is our luck that we are each peculiar in some way. I love Max because he is perfectly insane. And I love you because you write about madmen." When she asks him if he knows the madmen he writes about, Aaron replies, "For me the whole world is an insane asylum" (39). Clearly happy with this answer, she kisses him. Being mad—maybe it's not such a bad thing.

Also uncharacteristically for Singer's novels about America, various characters in Meshugah say positive things about this country. Talking about Miriam, Aaron says, "She had faced countless perils until she found a haven in this blessed land where a Jewish girl could drive a car, rent an apartment, study at a university, even write a dissertation on an unknown Yiddish writer" (49). Max also makes a number of positive comments. As a businessman, he has made money in this country and encourages Aaron and Miriam to do the same. But it's not simply the opportunities available here that elicit favorable remarks from the characters. Later, while bouncing a toddler on his knees, Max says he should be thankful for being born in "Uncle Sam's land" and not in Russia with its oppressive regimes (144). Interestingly, most of the positive comments refer to America's freedoms, an element that Enemies in particular was critical of.

Singer's less strident, more balanced view of America is also seen in his portrayal of the effect of America on Jewishness. The novel still raises the questions "What is a Jew?" (203) and "What does Jewishness consist of?" (38); but whatever answers the novel offers, it does not attack America for transforming Jewishness as Shadows, Enemies, and The Penitent do. In those novels, America is seen as tempting and seducing Jews with its "all-pervasive" influence (Shadows 373), distorting and diluting Jewishness (Enemies 138), and polluting and corrupting Jews who make the "slightest compromise" with America (Penitent 112). Admittedly, there is assimilation in Meshugah. At one point, Miriam says of her Jewish girlfriends: "Even those who got married or joined synagogues were thoroughly assimilated" (96). Also, as in The Penitent, Singer does suggest connections between assimilation and Nazism. In a very early passage in Meshugah, Aaron walks down New York's Second Avenue and thinks how the Yiddish presence on the street has diminished over the years: "What the Nazis had done to Jewishness in Warsaw assimilation was accomplishing piecemeal in New York—but neither religious nor worldly Jewishness was ready to become extinct" (10). This statement is not as extreme as Shapiro's belief that assimilation ends in Nazism (Penitent 91). Shapiro feels Jews may become Nazis; Aaron feels assimilation is decreasing Jewishness somewhat.

Singer's attempt to view the connection between assimilation and Nazism from a less strident perspective is also evident in the story of Aaron's lover Miriam. She is the daughter of Polish Jews who had assimilated. In Warsaw her father had lived as a freethinking Bohemian; her mother a Communist supporter. When the Holocaust came, Miriam became the mistress of a German in Stutthof and acted as a kapo for the Nazis. Although she seems proof of Shapiro's contention concerning the link between assimilation and Nazism, this is not the way Singer presents her. When confronted with the knowledge that she prostituted herself to the Nazis and was "worse than a Nazi," Aaron accepts her:

Unlike Hertz Grein, Herman Broder, or Joseph Shapiro, Aaron is much more understanding and accepting even in this extreme situation; and as a result, assimilation does not appear as dire an occurrence as it does in Shadows, Enemies, or The Penitent.

I would like to make one last point about the depiction of assimilation in Meshugah. In the passage quoted above, Aaron refers to Miriam — despite her parents’ assimilation and her own past — “as a Jew.” Shapiro in Penitent, however, implies that one step away from Jewishness is the same as a complete rejection of it. His inner voice tells him: “All other ways except extreme Jewishness must lead to the lies and lewdness you despise. If you don’t believe in the Shulhan Arukh, then you must believe in evil and in all kinds of empty and bankrupt theories that lead to the abyss” (43-44). Singer, in Meshugah, however, offers a very different perspective on the question of “Who is a Jewish?” There is a scene in the novel where Miriam makes a vow to be faithful to her lovers Aaron and Max. As if it were a religious ceremony, she covers her hair with a kerchief, lights candles, and reads a passage of the bible in a chant. Witnessing this vow, Aaron—whose Jewishness is far from what his rabbi father's was—senses “something awesome and ancient in Miriam’s voice and manner” (159) that connects her and him to the essence of Jewishness and “a sacred place” (160). There is still a part of him that is Jewish, what elsewhere in the novel Aaron refers to as “the Jew in Me” (209).

Towards the end of Meshugah, Aaron meets a rabbi traveling to the States to raise money for a Yeshiva in Israel who speaks about “something awesome” that defies assimilation and conversion. Responding to Aaron’s statement that he’s unmarried, the rav says,

The rabbi’s reference to “a spark,” of course, calls to mind the Cabala and the belief that in every element of the Universe there is some spark of God’s light[3] ; and this reference to the spark also serves as counter balance to the positions Grein, Herman, and Shapiro take on the state of Jews in America. No matter what happens to them or how much they depart from Jewishness or how much they question or doubt their faith, they will still, the rabbi seems to suggest, be Jews.

So where does Singer stand on the issue of America and its effect on Jewishness? If we look at Meshugah as the last novel in a series of novels dealing with these issues, we can argue that there is a progression from the diatribic vehemence of Shadows, The Penitent, and — to a somewhat lesser degree — Enemies to a more balanced view. In Meshugah the author seems to have become open to more liberal positions on America and Jewishness.

However, as with any question involving Singer's intent and message, the answer is less clear than it looks at first. Several issues, in fact, complicate any attempt to finally define his position on the impact of American society on Jewishness. First, there is the possibility that tirades such as Shapiro's and Grein's are not an expression of Singer's position, although their prominence in the novels in which they appear might suggest this. One of the critical debates about The Penitent revolves around this question. In two separate essays, Joseph Sherman and Minna Herman Maltz take issue with Harold Bloom who tends to equate Singer's views and Shapiro's. Sherman and Maltz argue that Singer distanced himself from Shapiro's positions repeatedly in the novel and its prologue, and that finally Singer's intent is not to privilege one point of view but rather to open a discussion and give voice to a diverse set of positions. What they say about The Penitent, of course, can also be said about the other three novels.

A second complication is the order in which these novels were published. If we approach the novels from the perspective of when they were originally written—Shadows, Enemies, The Penitent, and then Meshugah—there is a definite amelioration of Singer's views. However, given the order of publication in English with Shadows following Meshugah, amelioration is out of the question; and, in fact, the Jeremiad in The Penitent that Harold Bloom attacked in his review of that novel seems more justified while Sherman's and Maltz's reasoned differentiation of Singer's position from Shapiro's seems less convincing.

A third complication involves the dates of composition and initial publication of The Penitent and Meshugah. The books appear to take radically different positions on almost every issue ranging from the role of American newspapers to the smell of the streets. The differences suggest Singer had himself radically changed from the time he worked on one to the time he worked on the other. In fact, however, the periods during which he worked on the two novels appear to overlap. Penitent was published in Yiddish in 1973 and translated by Singer in the early 1980's, finally being published in English in 1983. Meshugah was serialized in Yiddish from April 1981 to February 1983. Apparently, while Singer was having Shapiro lambaste America and assimilating Jews in one novel, he had Aaron Greidinger saying it's not such a bad place and besides Jews will survive the bad that's here.

A final complication is that Singer's "final" words about America and Jewishness, as they appear in Shadows, may not have been the final words he would have wanted to say. Although written in the late 1950's, it was not published in book form until 1998, seven years after Singer's death. In his essay on Shadows, Richard Bernstein suggests the reason why Singer did not translate and publish it during his life was that it was too dark, too pessimistic. If this was the case, then perhaps he did want us to see the English translation of Meshugah which he apparently sanctioned (230) as his last thoughts on American Jewishness. But this too may not be completely the case: Bernstein also reports that Singer's publisher Roger Straus thinks that a more likely reason for not translating and publishing it earlier was that Singer was absentminded or that the project was too daunting because of the size of the book.

Despite these complications, there are still things that one can say about the issues discussed here. Clearly, Singer has a complex, lengthy relationship with America; and this relationship has resulted in a complex vision of America, a vision that—although on occasion seeming less critical of America's culture — frequently is extremely critical. To qualify Fiedler's remarks, Singer's characters may be invisible to America, but America is not invisible to them, and what they often see threatens their souls. In all the American novels — just as in all of his Eastern European novels — Singer fears what will happen if Jewishness disappears under the pressure a materialistic culture seems to offer; he fears what Aaron in Meshugah calls "a spiritual holocaust" (144). The sort of extreme Jewishness Shapiro and Grein turn to is unquestionably appealing to Singer. His works and his life attest to that. But they also attest to his inability to embrace extreme Jewishness. Aaron Greidinger, the character in these American novels who most resembles Singer, contains the "spark" of Jewishness but he cannot follow the rabbi who suggests this to him. Aaron and the other characters in these novels must find their own ways of carrying their sparks within a society that too often seems an "eternal Bedlam."

Notes

1. Joseph Sherman has written a thorough and informative discussion of the impulse toward accommodation in this novel in his essay "Guilt as Subtext: I.B. Singer's Memoiristic Fiction." RETURN

2. Singer frequently uses the image of upside-down-ness of topsy-turveyness in his fiction to suggest a world gone totally awry. A more light-hearted use of this image appears in his children's novel, The Topsy Turvey Emperor of China.RETURN

3. Singer's use of ideas and images associated with the Cabala is convincingly documented in Grace Farrell Lee's From Exile to Redemption: The Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer.RETURN