This interview with Mr. Singer was conducted by Joel Blocker and Richard Elman.

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Interviewers: Perhaps we could begin by asking you some questions about what has happened to Yiddish literature. Yiddish literature was, in its prime, a body of work which was very close to the masses by whom it was read—in language, in point of view, and in drawing from a common basis of experience. The annihilation of six million Jews during World War II changed all that drastically. The Yiddish-reading audience was decimated and continues now to dwindle from attrition. How, then, do you feel about writing in Yiddish today?

Singer: You don’t feel very happy about writing in a language when you know it dies from day to day. Although I don’t feel that Yiddish will die completely, it’s a fact that the number of readers is becoming smaller and smaller, and we—I mean Yiddish writers—are all conscious of it. The only thing is, I don’t have this feeling while I write; I don’t choose to remember it. I think that’s a lucky thing because if I did remember while I was writing that some of my readers were dying and others were not being born to replace them, it might have some influence on me. Writers, as a rule, don’t think about their readers while they write. As a matter of fact, thinking about the reader is a terrible pitfall for a writer. A writer should not think about who is going to read him because the moment he thinks about this, some other power interferes. In my case, writing Yiddish and thinking about the readers would really destroy the writer completely. But happily I never think about such things. When I sit down to write I have a feeling that I’m talking maybe to millions or maybe to nobody.

Interviewers: Nevertheless, are you and other Yiddish writers disturbed by this tragedy—not at the moment of writing, but in general?

Singer: We are all conscious of it when we are not writing. There is a lot of discussion about it in the Yiddish papers and in meetings of the PEN Club. We all feel the same thing and we express it in Yiddish by saying: “We talk to the wall.” We sometimes have the feeling that we are talking to nobody. On the other hand, I can tell you that those people who still read Yiddish are a peculiarly sensitive group. No writer gets the response a Yiddish writer does, if the readers really like him. The Yiddish reader, as a rule, is either very bad or very good. There is no such thing as a neutral reader. Either he loves the writer or he hates him. I have had good luck writing in the Yiddish paper, the Jewish Daily Forward. This paper still has eighty or ninety thousand readers and many of them—as a matter of fact, most of them—are readers of fiction. I still have a lot of readers and have the feeling sometimes that I am talking to thousands of people. I know, for example, that my novel, The Slave, which the Forward ran in its week-end literary supplement, had an audience of twenty thousand readers. Not many writers have such an immediate audience.

Interviewers: Then writing in Yiddish today has its advantages as well? You’re not completely “talking to the wall”? In fact, you’re probably better off than most serious American writers today who have no immediate mass audience of that size. If a writer in this country does enjoy such readership, it is not of the same kind as your Yiddish-reading audience.

Singer: I must say that the Jewish Daily Forward has a tradition of publishing good fiction. Its editors have always considered it a very important part of the newspaper. Our readers ask for fiction. It isn’t like American newspapers. The New York Daily News, for example, also publishes fiction, but I don’t think the News would lose many readers if it stopped publishing stories. The Yiddish reader is accustomed to reading novels and stories in the newspapers. For him, it’s a must. In this respect, we are lucky.

Interviewers: Do you see any future for Yiddish literature?

Singer: The future looks very black. They say that if a Yiddish reader dies, there is no one to replace him. This is true. How it happens that the Forward still has eighty to a hundred thousand readers today, and the Jewish Day Journal, another Yiddish newspaper, has close to fifty thousand is a riddle to me because twenty-five or even thirty-five years ago they said the Yiddish press would only last another five years. One of the greatest pessimists then was Abraham Cahan who helped build the Forward. He said that the first generation of Jews in this country would speak Yiddish, but the second generation would not. It was so, but somehow the Yiddish press goes on living. It’s like the Jews generally. They die all the time and they keep on living all the time.

Interviewers: If that’s the case, who then are you writing for—this still considerable Yiddish audience, a different audience in English and other languages, or both?

Singer: As I said before, I’m not very conscious of the audience. The only audience I’m conscious of—you may laugh at me—is myself. I have to please myself. After I have written something I am the first reader. I’m most interested in pleasing myself. It’s not modest to say so, but I think this is so with every writer. In my case this is especially important because Yiddish readers are not a homogeneous audience. They are of different kinds, some very educated, some not educated at all. For example, we have readers who will read good fiction, but their intelligence is so small and their taste so dubious that you just don’t know how they will judge and what they will accept. We get letters at the Forward from readers who say, “I read the wonderful novel of Sholem Asch. I also read the wonderful novel of—,” referring to some mediocre detective story we might publish at the same time. To him they are both alike. Yet we also have very many perceptive readers who know world literature and are very sensitive to literary values. That’s why when a Yiddish writer worries about his audience he gets all mixed up.

Interviewers: You don’t at all—somewhere in the back of your mind—have an image of someone reading you in a foreign language—English, for example?

Singer: That’s a very important question. They accused Sholem Asch of writing for the translator. I don’t say the accusation was true, but there were those who pointed to specific passages in Asch’s work and said: “You see these lines. They were written for the English, not for the Yiddish reader.” I take great care not to think about the reader in English or French or any other language. Nothing can spoil a writer more than writing for the translator. He must feel that he writes for people who know everything he knows—not for the stranger. It’s only when you write for your own people and when you don’t think about anybody else that the other people reading in a foreign language will appreciate your work and like it. Can you imagine Gogol writing for the French or the American reader? He was a Russian and wrote like a Russian and assumed that the reader knew everything he knew. You know, many of my Yiddish readers complain that I am too Jewish. They say: “We have already forgotten about all these things.” “You remind us of things we would like to forget.” But this doesn’t bother me. I assume that the reader knows as much about Jewishness and Jewish life as I do.

Interviewers: Would it be fair to say that you are actually writing in a somewhat artificial or illusionary context, as if none of the terrible things that happened to the Jewish people during the last two decades really did occur?

Singer: Yes, very fair. There was a famous philosopher, Vaihinger, who wrote a book called The Philosophy of “As If,” in which he showed that we all behave “as if.” The “as if is so much a part of our life that it really isn’t artificial. After all, what could be more artificial than marriage? When a man marries a woman he assumes that she’s going to be devoted to him and he acts as if his wife will treat him in this fashion. And so on and so on. . . Every man assumes he will go on living. He behaves as if he will never die. So I wouldn’t call my attitude artificial. It’s very natural and healthy. We have to go on living and writing.

Interviewers: But you do agree that at the heart of your attitude there is an illusion which is consciously sustained?

Singer: Yes. But take the case of a mathematician who writes a book and knows that there are only ten or twenty other mathematicians who will understand him. Still he doesn’t write for twenty people. He knows there will be mathematicians in later generations. Every man who creates something does not and should not worry about being understood. I would say I write for the best possible reader no matter how many readers there really are.

Interviewers: Then you’re not really a popular writer in Yiddish, just as in English those critics who originally acclaimed your work were part of an avant-garde rather than a mass audience?

Singer: No. I’m not a popular writer among Yiddish readers. As a matter of fact I had many quarrels with Abe Cahan who told me: “You write well, but it’s not for our readers.” Even my present editor at the Forward sometimes complains that my language is too difficult, my subjects too obscure. And when I write about devils and ghosts, for instance, he asks: “Who among our readers remembers such things?” No, I’m not a popular writer. But the truth is, in spite of this, I have become, to a degree, “popular.” Still, my work is only published in the week-end supplements which are devoted to literary works, rather than the regular week-day pages in which appears conventionally popular fiction.

Occasionally, however, I write more popular work under a different name—under the name of Warshofsky. Generally I sign my name in the Forward Isaac Bashevis, but once in a while I publish under the name of Isaac Warshofsky. When I write under the name of Warshofsky I take less care, but I never publish such things in book form. I use a different name to distinguish between two different kinds of writing. Since I must write a great deal and I cannot work on every piece of writing the way I work on the stories which I take very seriously, I publish some pieces which I consider belle-lettristic journalism. It sometimes happens that some of them come out well. In fact, one of my books, Mein Taten’s Bes-din Shtub (“My Father’s Courtroom”)¹ is a compilation of this kind of work, published under the name of Warshofsky. Only later I adopted it, as it were, and signed the name Bashevis . . . after I cleaned it up and worked on it.

Interviewers: Is it a common practice among Yiddish writers to use pseudonyms?

Singer: It’s not uncommon. I. L. Peretz wrote under many different names. Some say as many as fifty pseudonyms.

Interviewers: And you make a definite distinction between your literary and your journalistic work?

Singer: Yes I do. I must say I don’t work very hard on my journalism. I just write it and let it go. I write memoirs of my boyhood, reviews, feuilletons, and all kinds of things. As a matter of fact many of my readers like my journalism better than my stories, and some of my best stories were never published in the Forward. For example, “Gimpel the Fool” was first published in a Yiddish literary magazine.

Interviewers: About this business of names again. What is your real name?

Singer: My real name is Isaac Singer. My brother’s name was Israel Joshua Singer. In Yiddish I sign my fiction Isaac Bashevis. For some reason this name is sacred to me, and I won’t sign my journalism with it. Perhaps it’s because Bashevis is derived from my mother’s name. Her name was Bathsheba.

Interviewers: To come back to Yiddish literature for a few moments. Do you regard yourself as writing within that specific tradition, or do you feel that you have been more influenced by non-Jewish European authors?

Singer: I’ll tell you, I feel myself naturally a part of the Jewish tradition. Very strongly so! But I wouldn’t say I feel myself a part of the Yiddish tradition. Somehow I always wanted to write in my own way, and I never felt that I was somebody’s disciple. For instance, Sholem Aleichem, who was a great writer, always used to say that he was a disciple of Mendele Mocher Seforim. That was very modest. But I don’t have these feelings. The only person I have a lot to thank for—from whom I learned a great deal—was my brother, I. J. Singer, who was ten years older than I. But even here I wouldn’t say I was my brother’s disciple. I would almost say that I tried to create my own tradition, if one can use such words.

Interviewers: Then what do you think you did learn from your brother?

Singer: My brother wrote a number of novels—The Brothers Ashkenazi, which was translated into English; also Yoshe Kalb, which was translated under the name of The Sinner, and many others. I learned a lot from my brother, particularly in regard to construction. I consider him a great master of construction, and his writing was always quite close to me. Much more so than Sholem Asch’s, for example. So whatever there was to learn from my brother I learned, and I think it was a lot. My brother always used to say to me that a writer should not mix the essay with fiction. Many writers are half essayists and half fiction writers. Thomas Mann, for example. He writes a story, and in the middle of the story he inserts an essay or an article. He is himself both the writer and the critic. Even a writer like Dostoevski used to do this. In The Brothers Karamazov, while he is describing Father Zosima, he suddenly inserts a whole essay on what a saint is and what a saint should be. It is the old-fashioned way of writing. My brother always used to call this a literary mannerism. It’s true that the great novelists used this in a successful way. But for a young writer, a modern writer, it’s not the best model. I avoid these things. When I tell a story, I tell a story. I don’t try to discuss, criticize, or analyze my characters.

Interviewers: Apparently, your brother was very much aware of Flaubert’s dicta on the purity of the novel?

Singer: Yes, you’re right. I think in this case I also agree one hundred per cent with Flaubert—when you tell a story, tell a story. Use the words that give information about your characters, but don’t talk about them. When I write about a character I will say that he looked so and so and behaved so and so, but I won’t say he was a good man. Sometimes I read writers who say their characters are “noble” men. To me this is ridiculous. If the man was truly noble this should come across from what you tell about him. It’s up to the reader to judge.

Interviewers: Along these lines, then, do you consider yourself to be a “modern” or a “modernistic” writer? The American critic, Irving Howe, has tried to define this modernistic element in your work.² Do you feel this was just?

Singer: When I read Mr. Howe’s piece I was greatly surprised to find myself described as modernistic. First of all, it never occurred to me that I was a “modernist.” Secondly, I don’t know what a modernist is. This word . . . you cannot define it. What is modern today will be traditional twenty years from now. When Mr. Howe called me modernistic, I assume he meant that I write in a way similar to other contemporary writers. Maybe you could tell me. What does it mean to be a “modernist”?

Interviewers: Well, perhaps it means your work is different from traditional Yiddish writing. For instance, there are certain conventions that Sholem Aleichem uses that don’t appear in your writing. One example would be the “dear reader” device, the writer addressing the reader directly.

Singer: Yes. I try not to use the “dear reader.” It’s curious, however, when I write under the name of Warshofsky in an article or memoir, then it pops up when I need to make a connection of some sort. But in real fiction the “dear reader” device is always a trick, a substitute for telling the story. It’s only when the writer can’t think of anything else or has some spiritual interruption that he resorts to “dear reader”—as if to say, “Dear reader, forgive me for not telling the story the right way.”

Interviewers: Do you mind if we ask a few biographical questions at this point? You were born in 1904 in Poland and grew up in Warsaw. Warsaw at that time, during the first two decades of the century, was a center of Yiddish writing. Did you go to the University in Warsaw?

Singer: No. But I studied in a rabbinical seminary which was a kind of college.

Interviewers: How old were you?

Singer: I must have been about eighteen.

Interviewers: What did the studies encompass?

Singer: We studied secular as well as religious subjects and the Hebrew language. I never finished the seminary because a lot of the things they taught there I knew already. My knowledge of secular subjects was backward, but in religious matters I knew a great deal. My family was very religious. My father was a rabbi. So were both of my grandfathers.

Interviewers: Were they Hasidic rabbis?

Singer: My father was and his father as well. But my maternal grandfather was an anti-Hasid, a misnaged. There was always a conflict between my father and my mother about Hasidism because my mother was a little bit of a skeptic where that was concerned—especially about the zaddikim, “the wonder-rabbis.” My father always used to say that if you don’t believe in the zaddikim today, tomorrow you won’t believe in God. My mother would say, it’s one thing to believe in God and another to believe in a man. My mother’s point of view is also my point of view.

Interviewers: But did your family want you to be a rabbi?

Singer: Very much so. But I made up my mind very early not to be one because I began to doubt, not the power of God, but all the traditions and dogmas. I saw how one sentence in the Bible was made into volumes and volumes in the Talmud and later books. From my earliest childhood I had a feeling that one thing was God and the Higher Powers, which are above us and with us, and another thing is what human beings make of the divine. I think that many of the misunderstandings of religion stem from this . . . the failure to distinguish between God and man.

Interviewers: What kind of boyhood did you have? Many of your books portray urban lower-class Jewry in Poland. Were you, a rabbi’s son, exposed to this as a boy?

Singer: Yes. We lived on a very poor street in Warsaw, Krochmalna Street. Naturally I was in contact with poor people. Many of them used to come to my father for advice. Many of their questions were religious and moral, but they had a direct bearing on everyday life. Many of the women used to come and tell stories of woe to my mother. I always listened, and I had plenty of chances to listen, to poor people and rich people. My father was a dayan, a kind of a judge. So people used to come with all kinds of business problems and conflicts, and I remember trying to decide for myself which of them was honest and which of them was dishonest.

Interviewers: Well, is the clan you describe in The Family Moskat a family you knew in the Warsaw of that day, or is it purely invention?

Singer: No. It was invented. It is true that there was such a rich family in Warsaw in those days, and many people have thought that I was describing this family, but it isn’t so. The Family Moskat is a composite of many families I knew.

Interviewers: What do you think first impelled you to write?

Singer: There was one important circumstance: My brother was a writer. My father was also a writer. He published religious books. So writing and publishing were always familiar. However, the real reason for wanting to write was that I very often met situations which baffled me, and from the moment I knew that there was such a thing as literature, I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to describe such things. Incidentally, some of these situations now seem not as unusual as they seemed at the time. When I was about twelve years old I began to read worldly books. Before that I had read only Hebrew books. Well, the first worldly book that I read was a Sherlock Holmes collection by Conan Doyle in a Yiddish translation, and I cannot tell you how delighted I was with this book. I’m afraid even today to try and read it again because I know I would be disappointed. Every story of Sherlock Holmes sounded to me then like heavenly music. Something only an angel could write. As a matter of fact, I tried to imitate Sherlock Holmes. I considered myself a detective. I remember once walking in Warsaw and seeing a man who I immediately thought was suspicious. I said to myself, this man is suspicious. There was no reason whatsoever for me to believe this, but I followed him over half of Warsaw. After a while the man began to look back. At that moment I was Sherlock Holmes and I hoped that he would commit a murder and that I would catch him, and so on and so on.

Interviewers: This familiarity with criminals and their behavior comes across very strongly in The Magician of Lublin. . . .

Singer: Now that you say so, I think you are right, but it would never have occurred to me. This is the reason that critics sometimes know more than writers.

Interviewers: When did you begin to write seriously?

Singer: Let me continue with what I was saying before. One day my brother brought home a copy of Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment in Yiddish . . .

Interviewers: Also a detective story. . . .

Singer: Yes. But I understood very little of it. I was just too young. I knew that the hero had committed a murder, but that’s all. There is one moment in the book where the District Attorney speaks to Raskolnikov and Raskolnikov suddenly gets up and is ready to leave and then he sits down again. When I read these few lines I thought how wonderful this was. I don’t know why this made such an impression on me. . . . Now you ask, when did I begin to write: When I was about sixteen I began to write in Hebrew, not in Yiddish. I wrote terrible poems, although they were admired because the Hebrew was good. Then, after a while, I began to write stories, again in Hebrew. I even published a few in a Hebrew newspaper. But later I saw that writing Hebrew was an artificial thing because there was a lot of dialogue in my writing, and as my characters spoke Yiddish, I had to translate what they said into Hebrew—which was not a living language at that time. So, after a while, I said to myself: What am I, a writer or a translator? And I came to the conclusion that I must write in Yiddish because it was my mother language and the language of the people I wanted to write about. Since then I have written mostly in Yiddish. Wait—here’s something more I remember, a very interesting thing. Even before I learned to read and write, as a child, I liked to imitate my father and my brother. I used to take a pen and scribble on paper. All week long I would scribble and when Saturday came I had to stop. This for me was an ordeal—to have to wait until the Sabbath ended so that I could continue my smearing. Why? I don’t know even today.

Interviewers: You once told us that during your adolescence you spent three or four years in your grandfather’s village, and that this was a strong influence in determining your future as a writer.

Singer: Yes. Because this town was very old-fashioned. Not much had changed there in many generations. In this town the traditions of hundreds of years ago still lived. There was no railroad nearby. It was stuck in the forest and it was pretty much the same as it must have been during the time of Chmielnicki. I learned a lot about Jewish-ness in this town. The town was called Bilgoray. I could have written The Family Moskat (which takes place in Warsaw) without having lived in Bilgoray, but I could never have written Satan in Goray or some of my other stories without having been there.

Interviewers: Why? What did you do there?

Singer: I studied the Talmud. I studied the Bible. I studied Cabbala, although it was forbidden. According to the Law, a man should not study Cabbala before he is thirty, but I used to remove the books from the study house. In fact, I almost stole them. I took them to my house and read them often. I was fascinated by the Cabbala.

Interviewers: Considering all this, how did your parents react to your wanting to be a writer?

Singer: It was a great shock to them. They considered all the secular writers to be heretics, all unbelievers—they really were too, most of them. To become a literat was to them almost as bad as becoming a meshumed, one who forsakes the faith. My father used to say that secular writers like Peretz were leading the Jews to heresy. He said everything they wrote was against God. Even though Peretz wrote in a religious vein, my father called his writing “sweetened poison,” but poison nevertheless. And from his point of view, he was right. Everybody who read such books sooner or later became a worldly man and forsook the traditions. In my family, of course, my brother had gone first, and I went after him. For my parents, this was a tragedy.

Interviewers: You and your brother left Poland about 1935, your brother first. Why did you leave, and were you able to pick up right away and continue writing?

Singer: Yes. We were both pessimists. We both believed that it was inevitable after Hitler came to power that the Germans would invade Poland.

When I came to this country I lived through a terrible disappointment. I felt then—more than I believe now—that Yiddish had no future in this country. In Poland, Yiddish was still very much alive when I left. When I came here it seemed to me that Yiddish was finished: it was very depressing. The result was that for five or six or maybe seven years I couldn’t write a word. Not only didn’t I publish anything in those years, but writing became so difficult a chore that my grammar was affected. I couldn’t write a single worthwhile sentence. I became like a man who was a great lover and is suddenly impotent, knowing at the same time that ultimately he will regain his power. I shouldn’t have even tried to write anything, but I did try, again and again, without success. The novel I tried to write then I eventually threw away. In later years when I looked at it I was startled to find that it was the work of an illiterate man—and this was after I had written Satan in Goray and knew Yiddish fairly well. It was a real case of amnesia. One has to get a very great blow to act in such a way. But after a while I got over it, just like that lover whom I spoke of. I’ve seen this phenomenon at work in other writers. For example, those Yiddish writers who went to Russia, hoping that Communism would help them in some way, became so disappointed that some of them could not even write a single worthwhile sentence. Bergelson, who was a good writer, published a book in Russia called Birobijan. When I read this book I had the same feeling that I had in reading the stuff I wrote upon first coming to America. The man couldn’t write a word. It wasn’t merely a question of style.

Interviewers: At that time, did it ever occur to you to write in English?

Singer: I used to play with the idea, but never seriously. Never. I always knew that a writer has to write in his own language or not at all.

Interviewers: Did you ever think of going to Palestine in 1935?

Singer: Yes. I did think about it. But since I wanted to write in Yiddish and I knew that in Palestine Hebrew was the spoken and written language of the Jews, I decided not to. I could never really think seriously about going to Palestine even though I knew that Yiddish had no real future here. Perhaps I was selfish. I chose Yiddish not because I was a Yiddishist, but because I felt that this was the best way for me to express myself.

Interviewers: About the time that you were growing up in Warsaw, Jewish radical movements of one sort or another had a very strong influence. Jewish socialism in the form of Bundism was a powerful movement, and of course the Zionist movement was burgeoning. Did you ever feel yourself attracted to any of these groups?

Singer: For some strange reason, just as I was skeptical about religious dogma, so was I skeptical about political dogmas. Certainly I was very close to these people, and maybe that was the trouble: you know, sometimes when you see the cook, the food doesn’t seem very appetizing. While the ideologies sounded very attractive, I was close enough to see who was preaching them and how these people fought for power among themselves. The truth is, if you ask me, that the aches and troubles of this world cannot be cured by any system. Nevertheless, there are better and worse systems. Democracy seems to me to be one of the better systems, and there is no system which gives more power to the devil than Communism.

As for Zionism, I always believed in it. I think that Israel is a great hope for the Jewish people. But it is true that just as I knew the socialist cooks, I knew some of the Zionist cooks in Poland. . . . Yet, in the case of Zionism, I felt that whoever the cook was, the food was wholesome. It is true that when I was in Israel five years ago, I found there things which I didn’t like. But you find these things in your own home or in your own heart. Am I so delighted with myself and with my writing?

I always felt about the Soviet Union that it would never come to any good. From its very beginning it was a butcher shop, and it has remained so even today . . . even if there has been some “improvement.” When people have extreme power over other people, it’s a terrible thing. I always pray to God (and I do pray because I am in my way a religious man), don’t give me any power over any other human beings. I have always avoided this kind of power like the plague. As a book reviewer, I sometimes have some power and it is my hope that someday I will be able to stop reviewing books, because even this little bit of power I inevitably abuse. You know, I review the easier books first or I leave the more difficult ones for last. I do what is easier for me, and in this way I abuse my power.

Interviewers: Can we talk a little about translations now, the translations of your books? Do you feel that much of what you have written comes across in English translation?

Singer: I am very happy about my books being translated into English. In English my audience is a very real one. I don’t have to assume or imagine it. It’s not as if. And of course many of my English readers are intelligent Jews who know no other language, and I am very happy to reach them. I always take this business of being translated seriously. I am very scrupulous about English translations. Even though my knowledge of English is small, I always felt from the moment I found an American publisher that I wanted to work hard on the translations, because when I read some of the Yiddish writers in English, particularly some of Sholem Aleichem, I knew how bad translation could be. It was so bad you couldn’t read it. So I made up my mind that I would contribute as much as I could to the effort. For years I worked together with the translators on The Family Moskat. Incidentally, by working on that translation, I learned the little English I know. Since that time I have taken part in the translation of every one of my books. I think only in this way can a translation come out bearable. I say “bearable,” because you know just as much as I do that writers inevitably lose a great deal in translation. A friend of mine, also a Yiddish writer, once came to me for some advice. He thought that because I had been translated into English I could advise him on a translation of his own book. I told him that he must be prepared to lose at least 40 per cent in translation, and to make sure that the other 60 per cent had some worth. Or better still, to write something 140 per cent. . . .

Translation is an endless process, really. Every translation, like every book, is a problem in itself. The same translator can do a good job on one book and a bad job on another. Nevertheless, good translation is possible, but it involves hard work for the writer, the translator, and the editor. I don’t think that a translation is ever really finished. To me the translation becomes as dear as the original.

Interviewers: Well, you’ve been a translator yourself, haven’t you? Did you take as much care with other men’s work?

Singer: I must confess, no, I did most of my translations as a young man, and frankly I don’t think they are very good. I translated The Magic Mountain, Stefan Zweig, Remarque, all these from the German. I also translated from Polish and Hebrew. Although my translations were generally praised, I really didn’t work as hard on them as I should have. I think now I would do a much better job because I have learned what it can mean.

Interviewers: What did you do with that chapter in French in The Magic Mountain? Did you leave it in French, as was done in the English translation?

Singer: No. I didn’t because French can’t be transliterated easily into Yiddish, which uses Hebrew characters. But since it was bad French I had to translate it into bad Yiddish. You don’t have to make a great effort to write bad Yiddish.

Interviewers: While we’re on the subject of translations, it seems that the six books of yours which have been translated into English fall into two categories. One of these is the kind of writing best exemplified by The Family Moskat, that is, rather straightforward, realistic narrative; in this case, a family chronicle. The Magician of Lublin is also somewhat like this. But Satan in Goray and most of your stories seem to have a different quality altogether. They are much more stylized; they emphasize folk elements, particularly the demonic and the supernatural. Now our question is this: is this division of your translated work, as we’ve outlined it, representative of your total output?

Singer: In asking the question that way, you also answer it. . . . It is true that my work does fall into two such categories. The reason is simple: sometimes I feel like writing about the supernatural, in a symbolic way, and I also feel that there is a place for the realistic method. These two categories are not mutually exclusive; they are only two sides of the same coin. The world can be looked at one way or another, and the theme of a story determines its style. What I have had translated thus far is a good part of my work, but there are still many things which have not been translated and published. For instance, I have written a novel called Der Hoyf in Yiddish. In English I originally wanted to call it “The Beginning,” because it deals with what we spoke about earlier: the beginning of socialism and Zionism in Poland. But it will probably be called “The Manor.” The translation is now being completed. It is a large book written more or less in the style of The Family Moskat. There is another book which I have written about Jewish life in America. It’s called “Shadows by the Hudson” and it’s again written in a different style, a kind of combination of the two styles.

Interviewers: Why don’t you tell us something about “Shadows by the Hudson.” Isn’t this one of the very few things you’ve written about America?

Singer: Yes. “Shadows by the Hudson” is a story of a group of people who came to this country at the end of the Second World War or immediately thereafter and settled on the Upper West Side of New York—on Riverside Drive, West End Avenue, Broadway and so forth. While they live here, their minds and spirits are still in the old country, although, at the same time, they take roots here in New York. The times are mixed up and they are mixed up, and their story is full of confusion, unusual love stories. In fact, I think it’s an unusual kind of novel.

Interviewers: What are you working on now?

Singer: A book called “A Ship to America.” This is the first time I’ve ever written a novel in the first person. It has autobiographical elements, but it isn’t autobiography. It begins in Poland in 1935, but most of the book takes place in New York. It’s the story of a writer who comes to this country, loses his passport, and becomes, against his own will and intentions, an illegal visitor. In 1939, he gets his first papers and a permit to go abroad. On the eve of the Second World War, he goes back to Poland to marry his lover and bring her, and his son by another woman, back to America. I won’t tell you the end, because the book is now being serialized in the Forward on Fridays and Saturdays.

As for the style, I would say it’s different from anything I’ve done before. Writing in the first person is a new experience for me, and creates new problems in description and construction. The idea that writing in the first person is easier than in the third person is far from true. It is a style with many possible pitfalls and demands more caution from a writer. One of the chief dangers of such a novel is that it always threatens to become a mere memoir.

Interviewers: Now what about this folk element in your work? What use do you feel you are making of it, and how do you regard the so-called demonic trait?

Singer: There are two reasons for this: one is literary and the other is more than literary. The more than literary reason is that I really believe there are spirits in this world, and that man has a soul, and that the soul is not the only spiritual entity in this world. I really believe that. Of course, many people, Jews and Christians alike, have believed in demons and spirits. But that’s not why I believe in them. I truly believe that there are forces and spirits in this world, about which we know very little, which influence our lives. A hundred years from now, when people know more about other things, they will also know more about these spiritual powers. I believe that psychical research is a science of the future, not the past. I find it very easy to believe in reincarnation, possession by devils, and other such things. We have many proofs that these things exist.

Interviewers: Then why is it that you are so cynical about Hertz Yanovar and his group of spiritists in The Family Moskat?

Singer: I am not. It is my characters who are skeptical about this group. All the skepticism belongs to Asa Heshel and his wife. Still, I myself am a little skeptical about spiritism. Why? Because this is already a planned business. You sit down at a table and call forth a spirit. I don’t believe that a spirit can just be called forth to order. In the same way, I don’t believe that a man can just sit down and write a great poem. It won’t work; it’s not so easy. Spiritism has become a money-making thing, a kind of church, a dogma. So I don’t believe in it; but I do believe that it is possible for a human being to see a spirit in a spontaneous way. This perhaps explains why I write critically about spiritism in The Family Moskat.

Interviewers: Just for the record, have you yourself ever had what you would call a spiritual or supernatural experience?

Singer: Never, really. But other people, whom I trust, have. And I have read a lot about such things. If there is any field of knowledge in which I am some kind of scholar, it is psychic research. I have read a great deal on this subject, in English and other languages.

Interviewers: Are you familiar with Yeats’s mysticism, with theosophy and Rosicrucianism?

Singer: No, I don’t know Yeats. But I’ve read Madame Blavatsky. But let me come back to the literary reason for my use of the demonic and supernatural. First, it helps me to express myself. For example, by using Satan or a demon as a symbol, one can compress a great many things. It’s a kind of spiritual stenography. It gives me more freedom. For another thing, the demons and Satan represent to me, in a sense, the ways of the world. Instead of saying this is the way things happen, I will say, this is the way demons behave. Demons symbolize the world for me, and by that I mean human beings and human behavior; and since I really believe in their existence—that is, not only symbolically but substantively—it is easy to see how this kind of literary style was born. I really love this style and I am always finding new symbols and new stories. In The Slave, for example, I was unable to write about Jewish demons because this was primarily a story about Polish gentiles. Consequently, I found out all about Polish demonology. It fascinated me. Writers, as a matter of fact, fall in love with things like that, just as men fall in love with women. And certain things repeat themselves in every serious writer. I would say that every serious writer is possessed by certain ideas or symbols, and I am possessed by my demons and they add a lot to my vision and my expression.

Interviewers: You say that these demons and Satan symbolize the world for you. Now in many of your stories—like Satan in Goray, “The Mirror,” and “The Diary of One Not Yet Born”—these imps, demons, devils, and what have you triumph either partially or completely. This would seem to make you a kind of “devil’s advocate.” Perhaps you mean to imply that evil is triumphing over good in man.

Singer: In many cases, it does; and in many cases, it doesn’t. From experience we know that it happens often in this world—I’m not speaking now of the next world—that evil is victorious. Wouldn’t you say that Hitler’s success was the triumph of evil? Certainly, he almost reached his goal. And those Germans who went along with him, in his evil ways, have not been punished. On the other hand, the good sometimes prevails. In my story, “Gimpel the Fool,” Satan tells Gimpel to do a nasty thing. Gimpel does so, and then reneges on the devil. So you see, I make no rules; evil doesn’t always triumph and it isn’t always defeated. Once you establish a rule, it’s against literature and against life.

Interviewers: What you’re saying is that you are writing morality stories, more realistic examples, perhaps, than some of the old-fashioned morality tales, but in essence, stories of good and evil.

Singer: I would not characterize my stories as morality tales, but rather as being constructed around a moral point of view. Perhaps only The Magician of Lublin could be called a true morality tale. In this book, I had more of an “axe to grind.” It’s true that when I write I don’t look at the world as if it is beyond judgment. I do judge, not always explicitly, but more often implicitly. I even would go so far as to say that any writer who does not think in terms of good and evil cannot go very far in his writing. This is a tragedy in much of modern writing; authors have ceased to look upon life from the eternal point of view of good and evil. They look upon life in a purely scientific way; they say that such circumstances create such people and such people behave so. The moment a writer begins to regard life from a behavioristic point of view, the writing falls flat and the writer descends to the level of his own characters. As the Talmud expresses it: les din, les dayan, there is no judgment and no judge. My judgment is that good does not always triumph, that this is very far from being the best of all possible worlds. That’s why all my Jews are not good Jews. Why should they be any different than anybody else? The Cabbalists say this world is the worst of all possible worlds. They believe there are millions of worlds, but the worst is this one. Here is the very darkness itself. How can you expect that in the blackest darkness, in the deepest abyss of all, everything should turn out nice and proper? From a Cabbalistic point of view, I’m a very realistic writer. . . .

Interviewers: This is the second time you’ve mentioned the Cabbala. Have you read other mystical or occult works?

Singer: Well, I’ve read all the classic works of spiritism and occultism—not only the old ones, but the modern scientific books. The Phantasms of the Living by Gurney and Myers, which is a classic; there’s another one, too, about life after death. These were both written in the 1880’s in England, when the Society for Psychical Research was created. These were people of great integrity, and they did a great deal of research. You would be surprised at some of the things they discovered. Nowadays psychic research is undergoing a kind of crisis; but at the end of the last century it flourished. Yet even today there are many serious people engaged in it. You know that William James believed in occultism. Once you begin to study these things you are faced with the fact that here is an uncharted ocean of knowledge.

Interviewers: Do you know personally many of the people engaged in psychic research?

Singer: No, I do not. And I will tell you why: there is no field in which so many liars and charlatans abound as in this one. Let’s not fool ourselves: there are so many that it is incredible. But they have somehow managed not to utterly destroy legitimate psychic research, just as literature has not been destroyed by its numerous bad practitioners, by, say, the two hundred or so bad writers scribbling away in Brooklyn or the Bronx, in Paris and San Francisco. Both of these fields are good ones for liars and charlatans; they can really go to town. In the case of psychic research people, there is much obvious nonsense. They publish magazines about people who visit other planets and come down to tell whom they met there. I am not so foolish as to believe all these fakers. Still, I do read their magazines. I find their lies interesting. If nothing else, they are revealing fantasies. I do believe, however, in phenomena like clairvoyant dreams, extrasensory perception, and the like. And I think these things are all reflections of Higher Powers, whether divine or otherwise, of powers which surround us and are at work all the time.

Interviewers: Of course, then, you believe in God.

Singer: Yes, I do. I’m not, however, an observant Jew. I believe in God but not in man insofar as he claims God has revealed himself to him. If a man came to me and tells me he has been to the planet Mars, I would call him a liar, but I would not stop believing in the existence of the planet. I believe that the Higher Powers do not reveal themselves so easily; you have to search for them. Consequently, I have no faith in dogmas of any kind; they are only the work of men. Man is born to free choice, to believe, to doubt, or to deny. I choose to believe. I also believe in the power of personal prayer. While I shun organized prayer and religion, I would call myself a religious man. The Higher Powers, I am convinced, are always with us, at every moment, everywhere, except, perhaps, at the meetings of Marxists and other left-wingers. There is no God there; they have passed a motion to that effect.

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¹ See the four selections published in the January 1962 and April 1962 issues of Commentary.

² “Demonic Fiction of a Yiddish ‘Modernist,’” Commentary, October 1960.