Singer and the Tradition

In his introduction to Robert Bly's 1967 translation of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Isaac Bashevis Singer made the telling remark: "Writers who are truly original do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression, or to invent themes merely for the sake of appearing new. They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity, by daring to give everything of themselves, their most secret thoughts and idiosyncrasies." This statement of vision and craft works not only for Hamsun but for Singer himself. The key word is probably "sincerity," and Singer's is surely an art of overpowering sincerity, of rare personal revelation and vision. All of this is implicitly acknowledged in Irving Buchen's book, the first long study of the Yiddish writer we have. Buchen's book avoids the easy critical pieties and lofty generalizations which have characterized so much Singer criticism until now. These concluding sentences from a lengthy essay on Singer in Judaism are not untypical: "Rarely in modern literature do we find an artistic vision conveyed with such brilliance, vigor, imagination, liveliness, subtlety and effectiveness. But this is another story in itself." This "other story" is rarely told; the few honorable exceptions are first-rate essays by Irving Howe, Michael Fixler, Milton Hindus, and Irving Buchen himself. The need for a book on Singer is evident. With five novels, four collections of stories, and a volume of memoirs in print in English, and a great deal of fiction, including two novels, still untranslated from the Yiddish, it is surprising only that no one has written a long study on him before. The temptation to write books on contemporaries in mid-career, after all, is a sign of our age. Most of Singer's coevals of similar reputation can usually boast at least a half dozen. One reason for the curious critical reticence is probably Singer's unwillingness to conform to familiar patterns. As Irving Howe has told us on several occasions, Singer does not belong in any of the neat cubbyholes: he writes in Yiddish without being a Yiddishist; he is an "anti-Promethean," yet the "Promethean effort recurs" in his work; he is devoted to the mystical but yet is aware of'' psycho-analytic disenchantment." He is, in short (Howe tells us), an iconoclast. His work is "heterodox" in the sense that it avoids many of the conventional sources of Jewish inspiration. It is Singer's "sincerity," probably, which has kept away the orthodox-among believers as well as among literary critics. This is the climate of literary and theological opinion we must be aware of