LET’S BE HONEST. Out in the world of goyim, there have really been only two Yiddish writers that count. Thanks to Fiddler On The Roof, a fortunate few readers will have discovered the rapturous joys of Sholem Aleichem (on whose collection of stories “Tevye The Milkman” the musical was based). But in the second half of the 20th century, Isaac Bashevis Singer was the Yiddish colossus, a towering figure, even in mainstream literature.
A Nobel Prize-winner whose works in neat, black Penguin editions once crowded life he had left behind in Poland and the new home that so many of his characters found in America, just as he did when he arrived in 1935. These were tales swirling with emotion, steeped in Kabbalistic spirituality and transgressive eroticism. Put it this way: the best starting point may not be watching Barbra Streisand direct herself in the monumental act of narcissism that was (Singer’s damning verdict on her screen adaptation of his short story “Yentl The Yeshiva Boy”: “I did not find artistic merit neither in the adaptation, nor in the directing.”) Singer died in 1991. How would this uncompromising, iconoclastic figure have been received in the current cultural regime? A newly published collection of essays, , reveals a thinker who would never have submitted to today’s narrowing strictures and ideological edicts. Lamenting the politicisation of literature, Singer rails against writers who “came to the conclusion that instead of telling stories that happened some time ago — yesterday, a week, or a hundred years before — we should instead plan the future … It was a very big mistake”.
