'A Jewish Kind of Feeling of the World'

Isaac Bashevis Singer, speaking with an interviewer in 1983:

“I really don’t believe that a writer can have a programme. Many have; they say, ‘I’m writing about alienation’, or whatever they call it. I don’t have this programme. I have a story to tell and I sit down to tell the story, believing that if the story will be told in the right way, some truth or even generalisation may come out of it. In other words, I’m not one of those modern writers who are trying to write, with the power of literature, a better world. Not that I wouldn’t like to do it, but I don’t think it is in the power of literature.”

 

Singer defends fiction as pure storytelling. There are other ways to go about it, of course, including propaganda and pyrotechnics of form, but those strategies are rarely accomplished with grace or with the reader’s pleasure in mind. Storytelling as explained by Singer is at once primitive and sophisticated. It’s appeal is elemental: What happens next? We’re forever making up stories as a way to amuse ourselves and make sense of our lives. Why not at least occasionally turn it over to someone gifted at narrative, whether George Eliot or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa? No need to drag “realism” into it. Nabokov was a great storyteller. Singer continues:

 

“I would say that there are limits to the power of literature -- the socialists knew that a cheap brochure can bring more action than a great work. So, because this is not in our power, we should not really waste our time to do the impossible, because if you try so very hard to change history with a powerful novel, history will not be changed but the novel will be changed: it will become very bad.”

 

The first work by Singer I read, in some forgotten anthology, was his story “Gimpel the Fool” (1945; trans. Saul Bellow, 1953). I was hooked. His story "The Spinoza of Market Street" sparked my enduring interest in that philosopher. Those years were a time of triumph for Jewish-American writers. With Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Daniel Fuchs and Philip Roth, among others, Singer helped form my tastes in literature. One can’t conceive of postwar American fiction without the contributions of Jewish writers. Singer’s interviewer is the late Joseph Sherman who in 1997 would translate into English Singer’s great novel Shadows on the Hudson (1957). Today, with the growth of aliteracy and illiteracy, coupled with the spread of anti-Semitism, one hopes, against the odds, for a second renaissance. Singer more than forty years ago remained defiantly hopeful:

 

“I have this feeling, although there’s no evidence for it, that the Jew is going to last as long as humanity. I just believe. I cannot see a world without Jews. There will always be those that have a Jewish kind of feeling of the world, which is a part of humanity and is going to stay so.”

 

Singer was born on this date (perhaps), November 21, in 1903, and died at age eighty-seven in 1991.

 

[The interview with Singer was published in the May 1984 issue of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory.]