There are two Singers in Yiddish literature and while both are very good, they sing in different keys. The elder brother, Israel Joshua Singer, who died in 1944 and whose books are now gradually being reissued in English translation, was one of the few genuine novelists to write in Yiddish: a genuine novelist as distinct from a writer of short or medium-sized prose fiction. The younger brother, known as Isaac Bashevis Singer in English and more conveniently as Isaac Bashevis in Yiddish, is most accomplished as a writer of short stories blending grotesque and folk motifs (“Gimpel the Fool,” etc.), though he has also tried his hand at the full-scale novel.

Each of the Singers has won an American following, at different cultural moments and for strikingly different reasons. When the elder Singer was first published in English translation during the 30’s, his books—most notably, The Brothers Ashkenazi—gained an enormous popular success, appealing as they did to readers who enjoy the kind of thick and leisurely social novel that dominated European literature at the turn of the century. Intent upon portraying the historical changes and social relationships of East-European Jewish life as these became visible in cities like Warsaw rather than in the traditional shtetl—since the shtetl, after all, was too confining a locale for the novel—I. J. Singer built his work upon spacious architectural principles, composing in the manner we associate with the early Mann, Jules Romains, and Roger Martin du Gard. He mastered, as few Yiddish writers have, the problems of construction special to the “family novel,” such as the management of multiple layers of plot and the bringing together of a large span of novelistic time with at least occasional moments of intensity. He learned to see modern society as a complex organism with a life of its own, a destiny superseding, and sometimes cancelling out, the will of its individual members. Thirty years ago these qualities were attractive to readers of fiction, including those who thought of it as a serious art; today I. J. Singer’s work may appear a bit old-fashioned to young people brought up on Faulkner, Camus, and Genet.

Such young people form the very public that has been most enthusiastic about Isaac Bashevis Singer, a public composed of third-generation and semi-assimilated Jews, as well as some gentile fellow-travelers, whose nostalgia or curiosity about Jewishness is decidedly limited but who find in the author of Satan in Goray and The Magician of Lublin a congenial voice. He brings together esoteric Judaica, which requires no commitment from the reader, and a sophisticated modern tone, which allows for immediate recognition; and this mixture speaks to highbrow readers as no other Yiddish writer, and few American writers, can. These are readers who accept as necessary or even desirable the disintegration of the traditional novel and regard it as emblematic of a larger cultural disintegration; they have become, or been taught to be, impatient with books like The Old Wives’ Tale or The Thibaults or Buddenbrooks. I have argued elsewhere that a certain misunderstanding is at work here between American readers and Yiddish writers which, for obvious reasons, neither takes pains to remove. For while the admirers of I. B. Singer are right in feeling that he is closer to them than any other Yiddish writer they are likely to encounter—closer in his quizzical tone, his fondness for extreme states of being, his spiritual restlessness, perhaps even perversity—the truth is, I think, that he is not quite the “swinger,” not quite the delightfully abrasive modern voice they suppose him to be.

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We have here, in any case, another example of the notorious instability of literary taste. It would be convenient to foreclose the problem by saying that the elder Singer’s popularity is confined to middlebrows and the younger Singer’s to highbrows; but that piece of glibness would be an instance of the critical provincialism that takes the form of being splendidly up-to-date. For the truth is that both Singers are gifted and serious writers, and the varying responses to their work have less to do with their intrinsic qualities as writers than with their imaginative relationships to the Jewish tradition. I. J. Singer writes within the orbit of, even though he has begun a withdrawal from, the moral premises—rationalistic and humanistic—of 19th-century Yiddish literature. I. B. Singer has taken the step his older brother could not take; though a master of the Yiddish language, he seems to have cut himself off from the mainstream of Yiddish literature, moving backward to a pre-Enlightenment sensibility and forward to modernism. For the generation of Yiddish readers and writers contemporary with I. J. Singer, to be “modern” meant to abandon the introspective themes and rhythms of shtetl writers like Mendele and Reisen, and to bring into Yiddish literature the worldly concerns and narrative sweep of the European novel: what a now-aging generation of Yiddish readers will still praise in Asch, Opatoshu, Schneour, and I. J. Singer as dos Universal. Whereas for the American readers of I. B. Singer, a writer regarded with some uneasiness and reserve by the Yiddish public, it is precisely his strangeness, his distance from ethical programs and social concerns, that makes him so attractive. As they say in Yiddish: geh zei a chochem!¹

Whether directly or not, I. J. Singer absorbed the lesson of Flaubert that the novelist must keep himself strictly out of the events he describes, as if he were an invisible hand in literature somewhat like Adam Smith’s in economics. But this assumption was no more congenial to the earlier Yiddish writers, the generation of Mendele, Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem, than laissez-faire was to the village economy in which they grew up, for in a sense not true of writers in more sophisticated cultures, the Yiddish writers were—they had to be—in their fiction as stage managers, raisonneurs, ethical monitors, stand-ins for characters, and prompters for readers. The idea of “aesthetic distance” was, for most of these late-19th-century Yiddish writers, a luxury neither possible nor desirable; it is an idea that simply makes no sense to a culture which finds itself constantly in peril of destruction.

That, nevertheless, one strongly senses in I. J. Singer’s work the kind of detachment—a tactical employment of a subject rather than a cultural submission to it—which is entirely familiar in Western literature, is a sign, among other things, of the gradual secularization of the East-European Jewish world. The Yiddish writers of I. J. Singer’s generation tried consciously to find literary models outside their own tradition: they were sick of shtetl woes and shtetl charms; they wanted a richer and more worldly literature than their immediate predecessors could encourage. One also suspects that the coolness which is I. J. Singer’s characteristic note had a more personal source, as the consequence of a temperament somewhat rare in the Yiddish milieu. He was a deeply skeptical writer, not merely in regard to the political and national ideologies raging through the Jewish communities of Poland and Russia during the early years of this century, but also in regard to the whole human enterprise: the possibility of happiness, the relevance of salvation. Though sharing very little in his younger brother’s taste for the bizarre and the perverse, he is finally a “tougher” writer, more austere and disenchanted. His sensibility was of a kind one would expect to find in Paris more readily than in Warsaw.

Yoshe Kalb,² now reissued with an introduction by Isaac Bashevis Singer,³ is a short novel which hardly can display its author’s gift for controlling a complex plot, but which does reveal his characteristic tone of enigmatic, tight-lipped distance. In its own cultural ambience Yoshe Kalb is a minor masterpiece, and it should be rewarding to those American readers prepared to make an imaginative leap into a milieu where characters are frozen into a stance of fatality and there is no compensating psychological scrutiny or authorial comment—indeed, no intellectual relief of any kind. The novel presents a picture of corruption in the late-19th-century Jewish world, when Hasidism had degenerated from a spontaneous religious experience into a squalid turmoil of cliques, each with its petty court and charismatic zaddik. In this phase of Hasidism, as S. M. Dubnow has written, “The profitable vocation of zaddik was made hereditary. There was a multiplication of zaddik dynasties contesting for supremacy. The ‘cult of the righteous,’ as defined by the Ba’al Shem Tov, degenerated into a system of exploitation of the credulous.”

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This background I. J. Singer takes entirely for granted, as a cultural “given” certain to be known to his readers, quite in the way F. Scott Fitzgerald takes for granted the American tone of life in the 20’s. The disorders of personal experience comprising the foreground of Yoshe Kalb acquire meaning only through their inseparability from the disorders of Jewish communal experience, which are present as the largely invisible foundation of the book.

Its central figure is a timid boy, Nahum, the son of a rationalistic and cultivated rabbi. Nahum is suddenly thrust into the court of the zaddik, Rabbi Melech of Nyesheve, a character embodying in himself the coarse vitality of prost Jewish life as it found expression through Hasidism. Singer evokes the atmosphere of this petty court—its gabbling clients, its undercurrents of sensuality, its filial intrigue and commercial nastiness—with a marvelous command of detail, marvelous not least of all because he writes without those self-conscious glances at an alien audience which would tempt later Yiddish writers. Coming at a point in the development of Yiddish literature when it was possible for him to establish a critical disengagement from its norms while being entirely at home with its materials, I. J. Singer seems in his fiction to reach precisely the point of equilibrium between cultural self-sufficiency and cultural disintegration. It was an equilibrium all the historical forces of our century were conspiring to destroy.

The action of Yoshe Kalb proceeds through the marriage of the frightened young Nahum to Rabbi Melech’s daughter, a smoldering clump of flesh that yearns wordlessly for womanly sacrifice and sexuality. His daughter out of the way, Rabbi Melech feels free to marry for a third time, choosing as the joy of his old age a shapely and passionate girl named Malkah. Thus two disordered marriages prepare for a climax of disorder generalized. Nahum and Malkah, both strangers to the Hasidic court and both unable to adjust themselves to its energetic vulgarity, turn to one another and end in sin. Neither for the characters nor Singer himself is the reality of sin ever in question, but it is a reality not so much of judgment as of conduct, not so much of a moral choice as of a hastening, almost impersonal sequence of deviation and punishment. The norm of sinfulness may be buried somewhere in the life of the community and in the hearts of the characters, but it is the fact of deviation and punishment that dominates their behavior. As for Singer, who stands apart from both the idea of sin and its immediate consequence, what matters most to him is the experience of inexorability, the grip of event upon event, the way a step once taken shadows the whole of life.

Nahum now sets out as an exile, wandering dumbly—he is called Yoshe the Loon, Yoshe Kalb—through a maze of Jewish villages. He re-enacts, in the second half of the novel, a tragic parody of his original violation. Like a Dantean figure shuffling through the wastes of purgatory, he is a dead soul without will or words, locked forever in his deed. The novel ends with a spectacular struggle between religious sects, disputing for possession of Nahum-Yoshe. A sainted rabbi comes closest to ultimate understanding: “You know not what you do,” he cries out to Nahum-Yoshe, “there is no taste in your life or in your deeds, because you are nothing yourself, because—hear me!—you are a dead wanderer in the chaos of the world!”

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The vividness and pressure of this book seem to me beyond dispute, but its meaning beyond certainty. One can wonder at the parabola of Nahum-Yoshe’s life but it is hard to grasp the significance, the commanding sense of it that I. J. Singer intended. We could, of course, fall back upon the current notion that literature need not be interpreted, but this notion strikes me as neither appealing nor defensible. Refined and complicated as we may wish to render it, the desire for “meaning” in regard to a work of fiction is inescapable, and we had better adjust our critical theories to the fact.

I would surmise that the power of Yoshe Kalb derives from a relationship on I. J. Singer’s part to the religious culture of East-European Judaism that is somewhat similar to the relationship Hawthorne is shown to have in The Scarlet Letter to the religious culture of New England Puritanism—though the skepticism of Singer is less dialectically clever and more emotionally ominous than Hawthorne’s. A fiercely held balance is sustained by Singer between the traditional materials he employs and the attitude of withdrawn objectivity he takes toward them. The world and his vision of the world are allowed equal rights, neither absorbing the other. And the same might be said in regard to the moral norms of the shtetl world and Singer’s use of those norms in the novel: it hardly matters whether Nahum’s act is regarded as sin or social disruption; the consequences are largely the same (though the possibility of regarding this act as social disruption depends, as Singer clearly sees, upon its being, or having been, regarded as a sin by the community).

What finally struck me in reading Yoshe Kalb was how tightly locked within the premises of his culture the work of a novelist must be. In Yoshe Kalb, every act carries social and moral weight, and no one in the audience to which the book was addressed could possibly have doubted what that weight might be. A half-century later we must grope and approximate, fearful that the more ingenious our readings, the more likely that we are smuggling in our own preconceptions. Yet is this not true for all fiction, the very greatest and the most commonplace alike? Try teaching Stendhal to college students in New York, or persuading California students that the moral inquiries of Ivan Karamazov are relevant to their lives, and you will see what I mean.

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While writing this article I happened to be reading Mrs. Gaskell’s charming short novel Cousin Phillis. It would be hard to imagine two works of fiction more dissimilar than Cousin Phillis and Yoshe Kalb, the one with its rural English setting and Victorian romance, the other with its Jewish intensities. Yet, for all their distance, the two books operate on the same literary principles. Both take for granted their own arc of experience and culture, as if there were nothing else beyond it, no other village, no other values; both assume that, for the attuned reader, conduct rendered with exactness will be transparent and require no gloss; both stake a great deal on the nuances of a language completely shared by characters, writer, and reader. Whatever is hermetic and inaccessible in the one must, finally, be the same in the other. Today the world of Yoshe Kalb seems utterly remote; but will not the same be true for Cousin Phillis fifty years from now?

What a strange and baffling genre the novel is—a genre from which we have come to demand the profoundest scrutiny and criticism of our experience, yet which is utterly dependent on the turnings of historical change. Painfully conscious as we are these days of how precarious the life of Yiddish literature is, we might profit from the reflection that, in any perspective but that of the immediate moment, it may share the fate of every other literature.

¹ “Go be clever!”

² Harper 8s Row, 246 pp., $4.95.

³ Though written with brotherly feeling and a quantity of respect I. B. Singer seldom shows to other Yiddish writers, this introduction does not serve the book well. It keeps running off at tangents, one of them concerning the ways in which the Yiddish-speaking Communists tormented I. J. Singer—which may be true but is not of much general interest. For reasons I will discuss later, what the book needs most by way of introduction is a careful historical reconstruction of Hasidism, especially in its phase of decline; and this it does not have.