By Howie Stier / Special to the BJV
The salient project taken upon by this paper to promote new works of contemporary Jewish writers won’t at all be undermined by my case for the alternative; dead Jews need support, too.
Isaac Bashevis Singer for one. His massive oeuvre now fills estate sale shelves, detritus of heirs to a previous generation. Forgotten by Hollywood (it’s been a looong while since Yentl), that Nobel Prize of his and a token would get him on the subway today, if only the subway still took tokens. Yet he is supremely relevant to us now.
The Penitent is a richly enjoyable if unfortunately titled late novel of Singer’s, which could only seem more custom-crafted for our point in history were the manuscript just found stashed in a print-clip cluttered desk drawer at the Jewish Daily Forward, where the work first ran in the 1970s.
The story of a Holocaust survivor returning to embrace Yiddishkeit (the very definition of Baal Tshuvah – and why the book doesn’t flaunt that title in lieu of a total goyische predication, evoking hooded robed marchers in the sage smoked alleys of Sevilla, I’ll leave for some Yiddish Book Center sheep-skinned Yiddishist to run to ground) and making aliyah is a subject aligned with the resurgence of Jewish identification – notably among Jewish students targeted for harassment on American college campuses – In the post October 7 2023 era. Singer’s execution, all Hemingway-spare, producing a piece more ambitious than a short story but pared down enough to knock out over Shabbos, aligns with an age of a Department of Governmental Efficiency.
Middle aged business-type Joseph Shapiro’s tale is one long crescendo, a literary Ravel’s Bolero. The die is cast with an epiphany that his bourgeoise life in the United States is pathological and with less consideration than you’d place in scoring Tanglewood summer season tickets, Shapiro dumps the wife and his lover, packs a bag, cabs it to the airport and dropping cash on the spot buys a seat to Israel. Surprisingly these tasks played out in a pre-internet 1970s milieu appear on the page as more efficient, if anything a satisfying evocation how things used to be, whereas the realm of new fiction would demands characters glued to stupid phones. Bad enough I’m tethered to one, do I want that intrusion in my reading? Mundanities of divorce and finances and paperwork will be handled down the road, he is certain, and this confidence is his defining virtue. There’s a parallel to the determination of Knut Hamsun’s Isak, the forest dwelling protagonist in Growth of the Soil, which earned Hamsun, Singer’s noted inspiration, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Like Isak, Shapiro is unwavering in his unconventional path, evades modernity, and secures a life of contentment.
Singer was a Warsaw rabbi’s son and, like his Shapiro character, learned in cheder in pre-war Poland. He writes with authority on halacha and minhagim and the text is enriched when that learning is flexed. For example, when Shapiro grabs a couple books for his trip, one is an arcane volume of the Kabbalist Rabbi Chaim Vital. Singer chooses the in-flight reading to inspire the reader, where a hack would drop the opportunity to do so.
Certainly a profound read for the college aged, one that likely will encourage further exploration of Singer. And know, that if you only read dead Jews all the rest of your days you’ll be richly rewarded, and merit the blessing of keeping their memory.
The son of a survivor of the Lvov Ghetto and Janowska concentration camp, Howie Stier is a longtime journalist who reported on crime and mayhem in the five boroughs for the New York Times, covered celebrity news from the red carpet and back alleys of Hollywood Boulevard for Entertainment Tonight, and has relocated to the Berkshires where he’s focused on two considerations: literature and learning Torah – as havel havalim hakol havel (breath, breath, all is breath).