In Israel Joshua Singer, the conflictual ties between the individual and the collectivity are a thematic constant and give rise to numerous narrative variations. From 1916 on, this author’s first stories (he is known above all for his historical frescoes) are expressionist in manufacture and evoke a universe at once primitivist and decadent, immersed in a matricial space-time or peopled by eccentric individuals, outlaws, isolated from the Jewish community by assimilation into the great Polish or Russian city. We find an analogous yet “displaced” system of oppositions in the stories written some twenty years later, at the end of the thirties, in the context of American emigration. There the theme of “return” acquires an original dimension, linked not to a form of fidelity to communal codes but to a fertile oblivion that brings the individual into accord with his deep identity within a new alliance with the human community.
The image of the refractory individual and the antagonistic image of the community’s pull on the solitary individual appear in two contemporaneous stories, written in America, which bring the American scene into the work: “Willie” and “Pilgrimage” (Oyf Keyver Oves)1. These two stories are organized around inverse and complementary schemas linked to the rupture that structures them — that crossing of the Atlantic which is made in opposite directions for the characters and posits the images of two antithetical worlds, joined by the passage from one to the other.
In “Willie,” emigration carries the main character from the shtetl to the American countryside, where he becomes a farmer and marries a non-Jewish woman. In “Pilgrimage,” the return of the Americanized emigrant to a native land fantasized as “idyllic” takes place under the pretext of a “pilgrimage” to the parents’ grave, joined by the powerful but unavowed motive of the search for a Jewish wife, a daughter of the old continent, who would make concrete the continuity between the two worlds. These schemas stage the conflict between the individual and the collectivity and introduce, as the knot of the plot, the illusion of a possible reconciliation. In both cases, this movement proves deceptive and leaves the individual deprived of freedom and suffering from a redoubled solitude.
The difference between the two stories lies first of all in the central character. In “Willie,” it is a sustaining character, with simple and yet fundamental desires, for his deep being incarnates the possibility of a fresh start of individual life in America. In “Pilgrimage,” the schematism of the statement expresses itself through the satirical treatment of a hackneyed theme. This “return to the native land” is from the outset devoid of all depth, in the image of the central character, petty and contemptible, who undertakes it as if by error. From this disparity come the contradictory images that emerge when one compares the two stories, and the opposite treatment of their fundamental theme: oblivion.
In relation to the expressionist texts of the twenties, one observation imposes itself, running through the language and characterizing the difference in style: the community is “distant,” the unity — even the conflictual and violent unity of the earliest narratives — is forever forgotten, as if the very body of the language had expelled all memory of it. The subtle equilibrium in the incorporation of characters into nature and into the human community that characterized the very subtle style of the “first” Singer fades before the “thematization” of meanings once diffused through form. The fusional style that incarnated the individual’s adherence and his rendings gives way to an ideologized vision of nature: in “Willie,” it falls to the central character to incarnate it, against a Jewish collectivity that has drawn away from the essential. In “Pilgrimage,” on the contrary, it is the collectivity of the shtetl that is ironically adorned with the charms of the healthy life, set against the perverted city-dweller.
Nature becomes an ideological theme in Singer as his writing loses its concrete rootedness in the Polish Jewish world and is propelled by the forces of memory and uprooting. In “Willie,” it serves as a hyphen between the two worlds, a fundamental mark of continuity. It is through the permanence of a relation to the land that Wolf, the young Jewish countryman who refuses the sociability of the shtetl and his father’s mode of life, finds in America the possibility not only of another life, but above all of a life similar to that of his childhood. America, in this story, is merely a “reproduction,” a tracing of the antagonisms of the Old World: New York with its stifling Jewish quarter is the enlarged replica of the shtetl, described as lugubrious and polluted, while the American countryside has the same simple charms as its Polish counterpart, the ideal locus of childhood.
The idea of nature synthesizes a certain number of distinctive traits that form part of a system characterizing the “Singer” of the second period: it defines, first of all, the non-Jew, within the symbolism opposing the individual to the collectivity. There is something like a fundamental antinomy at the heart of the Singerian ideological system, between the dispositions that push the individual toward nature and those that push him toward the collectivity. This contradiction did not exist in the early stories, where the Jewish community was represented by marginal aspects that did not posit it as the norm of individual existence. This configuration also has its limits and variations, as precisely in “Pilgrimage,” where the life of the little town represents, in the eyes of the New York Jew, a sort of pastoral at once idyllic and laughable. Finally, it is found associated with other oppositions, as in the story “In the Mountains” (In di Berg), where Jewish life is reduced to its Americanized and vulgar version and where nature represents a real plunge into interiority and the loss of ethnic bearings. Nonetheless, the general problematic remains associated with this fundamental link between an individuality endowed with aspirations bound up with nature (silence, the community of mute lives such as those of animals and plants, a healthy and laborious life, solitude) and the oblivion of Jewish sociability — that is, not only of the rites and commandments, of the language and the culture, but also of the social being shaped by the life of the shtetl and by history: this need, seen as specifically Jewish, to be associated with a multiplicity welded together by common values and practices. Thus Wolf’s father leaves the rich estate he owns in the countryside, in order to live as a merchant in the little town, quite simply to be “among the Jews.”
If this opposition is constructed so forcefully, it is because it now has, for Singer, beyond the family reminiscences it evokes, a considerable ideological weight. It is one of the stones of the edifice rebuilt during the years preceding the war in Europe. Faced with the threats that seem ready to descend, Singer opts for a Jewish being capable of bearing the weight of the past, participating in the mute force of nature, in its work of destruction and conservation. Nature represents at once the auxiliary and the negation of time. Faced with the totalitarian contestation of the Jewish being linked to history, Singer opts for a minimal memory exercised through the intermediary of individuals capable of opposing historical negation. And so the central character of the story is from the outset a being endowed with strength: physical strength, as the recruiting officer notes with surprise when Wolf presents himself to the army, and, more fundamentally still, a simple and spontaneous pride in his Jewishness. A problematic of identity takes shape in an entirely new way, nature now seconding what is a priori hostile to it: the Jewish being.
The character who ironically occupies the front of the stage in “Pilgrimage,” the insignificant Nathan Goldblum, a sort of utterly unsympathetic antihero, incarnates an inverse position: in accord with the collectivity that surrounds him, conforming to the trajectory of an emigrant just grown rich, he in fact leads a timorous existence devoted to resentment, to social and sexual frustration, to fear and selfishness. His conformity to the collectivity is only superficial, and his banal appearance conceals a congenital weakness and an altered relation to others. His filial piety is provoked essentially by remorse and unease; his memory is only superficially touched, and that more under the effect of conventions than of any personal impulse. It is in the form of nightmares born of a bad conscience that this vague social pressure — which in him replaces authentic memory — expresses itself, through the painful dreams of hot nights in which the memory of his parents becomes more demanding. In fact, oblivion in him is a weakness, in the image of his other failings. He will forget, right to the end, to have erected the gravestone for which he came to accomplish this far-from-attentive “pilgrimage.” It is the same with his unavowed project: to marry a girl from the “old country.” There too, a form of collective persuasion incites him to play the game, while he himself is decided on no genuine choice. His motivations are in both cases devoid of the inner force conferred by a true desire; and so they will be pitilessly swept away by reality.
His blindness is shared by the collectivity, and chiefly by the young woman who will end up marrying him and leaving with him for America. The meeting of these characters, like the American Jew’s journey to his native land, rests on an essential misapprehension, each protagonist caught by a wholly fabricated lure: the mirage of an advertising poster in New York, vaunting the charms of a transatlantic crossing under the features of a pretty woman; the exotic vision of a Jewish little town left twenty-five years earlier, which one believes one will find again as a haven of freshness, where life is easy and cheap, where the collectivity bends over backward to welcome the “rich” American, not without drawing some profit from it; the same goes for the young Polish Jewess who represents the quintessence of rustic charm, and for whom the one who returns to the country incarnates the mythical America of Hollywood films; and likewise for the community, ready to let itself be duped by a mere skilled worker provided it can believe in his dreams of prosperity and establishment. One will have recognized in passing a schema already exploited by Sholem Aleichem2, to which Singer gives a categorical answer: faced with such an accumulation of reciprocal mirages, the denial of reality, cruel as it is, appears almost salutary.
The disabusing is reserved for individuals, victims of a sort of collective madness that has spared no one. Motivated by insincere pretexts, the undertaking of an anecdotal and conventional memory serves only to separate the two worlds still more radically and to isolate the protagonists more painfully. The problematic of oblivion is altogether different in “Willie.” It comes down, in fact, to a wager: if an individual as far from Judaism as the American farmer Willie can finally resist oblivion, were it only by an infinitesimal parcel of his being, it is because the undermining work of nature has succeeded in sparing a spark of collective memory while giving the individual the hardening necessary for personal salvation. The story thus invites us to explore the limits of oblivion and the unforeseeable resistances of memory. Paradoxically, oblivion is invested with a certain positivity, while memory is seconded by what would seem bound to negate it: nature. This is Singer’s way of finding an acceptable compromise to the problems of the collectivity, at the expense, however, of individual serenity.
Indeed, in a certain way and contrary to the first of the collectivity’s precepts, oblivion is desirable, and all the more sought after in that it will finally prove impossible. In the first place, oblivion owes everything to nature: when the child, by his peasant’s build, seems to forget even the very bearing that befits a Jew; when he turns away from the learning of the holy text to wander in the fields, not so much rebellious as forgetful, incapable of retaining the words of the “Song of Songs”; when, finally, he forgets even the language, the script, even the memory of his parents, and a deceptive natural illusion makes him believe that he has not really broken with what was closest to him in coming to settle in America, since he has found there what was necessary for him to live: the land, the sky, immediate life.
Thus the almost passive and involuntary oblivion that characterizes the child’s difference (his symbolic “bastardy”) is transformed, with emigration, into an irreversible process, insofar as the individual is alone in confronting it. It runs parallel to integration into the new country, but signifies, in the character’s eyes, a form of paradoxical fidelity to his deep identity. His settling on a farm — unlike most Jewish immigrants who hire themselves out in the workshops of the great cities — his marriage to a woman of the country, a Protestant, his almost complete assimilation, all pass through an apparent oblivion of his Jewishness. The process engaged in the Old World (with the army in particular) and pursued in America takes on the face of oblivion and not of transgression, insofar as the one who accomplishes it has no consciousness of the slightest guilt. It is an almost mechanical action that takes place without any positive will to rupture, as if in prolongation of childhood and of the ocean’s waves. Nor is there any conversion other than that which reinstalls nature at the center of the essential rhythms of existence, supplanting without struggle the calendar of the Jewish feasts. And, to tell the truth, did the farmer Willie seem to have much left to forget of what the Jewish child kept in memory? Assimilation is facilitated by the character’s passivity and the neutral space that is created within his new existence. “Everything was as before” for the young man returned to his true “native land” — that is, to the land and its labors. It is this continuity of rootedness that constitutes Wolf’s sole fidelity. His new alliances, his wife, his society of adoption, his civic insertion ask of him minimal accommodations, facilitated by the dominant Protestant character of American civilization: there too, it is a feeling of “recognition” that operates, through his wife’s first name (a “Jewish” name, Esther), the importance of the Bible, the relatively stripped-down aspect of the worship… On the other hand, the mixed marriage functions as a space of reciprocal neutralization, especially once the generation of the fathers vanishes. The absence of ties with any collectivity reinforces this way of living apart from customs. Husband and wife live a life of labor, silent and machine-like, and like Wolf, become Willie, Esther too progressively abandons her former religious practices. Abstention is symbolically the only possible action: thus Willie votes in perfect conformity with the opinions of his neighbors, less from conviction than from indifference. One may note that Singer evades, with regard to America, the problem he poses to his characters when he considers their life in Poland: withdrawal from the collectivity is sanctioned by no political impasse, unlike what is envisaged in later stories set in Poland such as “The Stranger” (der Fremder) or “Village Jews” (Dorfsyidn)3.
Private life is in the image of this “neutrality”: husband and wife are bound by their common nature, silent and humble, attached to the deep life forged by habits. Their relation is woven of strangeness, with no projection into the future since they have no child, with no dimension other than a sort of eternal present. They live without a past, in a celibate existence that would resemble childhood were it not consecrated entirely to labor. It is nonetheless this mute and unshining life that appears the best suited to keep intact a paradoxical fidelity. The signs of this fidelity are, however, quite slender in Wolf’s case. Hostile since his childhood to the shtetl mode of life, which is for him associated with the negative image of the father, his inner distance and his estrangement from any Jewish community make the resurgence of the past improbable. And yet this welling-up of memory takes place when the war ravaging the Jewish little towns of Russia spreads across the front pages of the American newspapers. As in the novel Shtol un Ayzn (“By Iron and by Fire”)4, it is the misfortunes of the Jewish communities during the First World War that trigger the reflex of solidarity. In this case, the indissoluble attachment to the community of origin translates into the reminiscence of the maternal figure, free of conflict, into the feeling of debt toward the parents — suspended by the indefinite time of absence but not really obliterated from memory — into the guilt felt at living as a non-Jew and in ease, while the Jewish little towns of Eastern Europe are put to fire and sword.
In a still more positive way, this impression of belonging manifests itself for Willie when he returns for the first time after long years to New York, to the Jewish quarter, where he feels strangely close to those around him. Yet this unexpected memory is not totally in rupture with the farmer’s deep being, and the problematic of oblivion is not thereby invalidated: this minimal adherence is, so to speak, constructed by oblivion and its capacity for rupture. At the term of this long process of assimilation, something subsists: the evidence of an indisputable identity despite its tortuous wanderings. Just as Wolf proudly declared his Jewishness before the military instructor or the immigration official, the farmer hardened by a coarse life hesitates at no moment, in the face of the difficulties that present themselves, to bring his parents over to emigrate. The most important thing, according to Singer, is perhaps this minimal gesture of safeguarding; in the same way, the rabbi whom the farmer consults to ask his advice regarding his personal situation declares to him, as a man who knows his world and America:
“Since in any case the Jews here are not Jews and the goyim are not goyim… You, be a Jew.”5
Which amounts to saying that there are several ways of being a Jew and several ways of forgetting to be one, among which Willie has doubtless not chosen the worst. But it is also, on the rabbi’s part, the disabused observation of a collective existence reduced to its most individual, most voluntarist expression, depending on the personal ethical effort more than on the strict application of the law.
What form of minimal memory, then, is exercised when Willie takes the decision to renew ties with so distant a past by writing to his parents, of whom he knows nothing more? To all appearances, this memory is cut off from the collectivity that produced it. The effort of recollection born of personal energy and filial anxiety nonetheless borrows the paths of acquired culture: remorse at not knowing whether it was fitting to say the kaddish, since there is no certainty regarding the parents’ death; difficult reunions with the letters of the alphabet, with the mother tongue, with the ancient name, and finally with the father… This reappropriation provokes, on the other hand, a feeling of estrangement with regard to personal life, a distance toward the non-Jewish wife, a recoil in relation to private achievements…
Nevertheless, one sees clearly that this effort of reconciliation is nothing like a conversion, when it finds itself again confronted with the strict criteria of the religious collectivity. For Singer, at this point, fidelity becomes more problematic than when it is threatened by oblivion. For, faced with the assaults of orthodoxy and the intransigent piety of the father, come at last to rejoin his son in America, Willie finds himself constrained to play the same role as in the past, with as his sole rampart the individualist values of America, the “every man for himself” of which he finally remains rather little convinced despite his solitary life. In this light, Jewish identity becomes symbolic, linked to a consented adherence: thus Willie’s wife conforms easily to the daily practices of Judaism, to everyone’s satisfaction, out of simple attachment to her husband and her parents-in-law. The first part of the rabbi’s injunction proves accurate: the wife’s conversion depends essentially on the husband. This is the result of a specific vision of women in Singer. In them, it is the affections that prevail, as well as a certain solidarity proper to women among themselves, which incites them to immediately practical choices. It is not so much out of love of tradition as out of the will to reunite the dispersed members of the family group that they act. Thus a certain ethical conformity and an essential good will suffice to transform the farmer’s wife into a practicing Jewess. Her adherence to the religion of her parents-in-law has nothing artificial about it, insofar as it is dictated by feeling and by the will to recover a family, a belief to conform to. The same neutral ground that permitted Wolf’s rapid assimilation also serves the conversion and integration of Esther into Judaism.
In Wolf’s case, however, mere conformity does not suffice. The same criteria that lead to his wife being accepted reject him from the world of men, welded together by the values of erudition and a specific sociability. The difference that isolates Willie seems at once infinitesimal and irreducible because inscribed in the body and its most elementary appearance: what separates father from son is, once again, the sensation of a radically different nature and body, with nothing in common:
“As of old, the old man suddenly wondered how it came about that he had fathered such a son (p. 83)”
Thus it is the figure of bastardy that prevails, in this story, over that of the convert — reinterpreted, on the contrary, positively with Esther’s conversion. The passage to another culture is possible, but not the choice of a different body, a different mind. In the mixed world where Jews now live, cultural differences are far less important than those that separate individuals irreducibly, which amounts to posing the problem of Jewish identity in almost Oedipal terms, somewhat in the manner of the American Jewish novel. In this conflict, no mediation is possible, and the silence, the final withdrawal of Willie, driven from his kingdom by the very ones he had sought to rejoin, seals the failure of all will to fusion. The solitary individual pays with his serenity for the reconstitution of the group, and once again plays the role of the scapegoat, whose setting-apart seals the cohesion of the whole. Thus individuals have hardly any choice in relation to the collectivity, which alone elects or rejects them. The inner adherence to collective values depends essentially on the way the relation of inclusion or exclusion is knotted. On this primitive gesture depend the subsequent fidelity and the natural or artificial character of the relation of belonging. This is, for Singer, the point where cultural and family schemas intersect and where the mystery of an identity is constructed. The too-simplistic vision of a “nature” opposed to the values of Judaism, as well as the reciprocal roles of oblivion and memory, is thus modulated accordingly.
The long story “In the Mountains” (In di Berg)6 was published in the newspaper Forverts as a sort of “novel” of life in America: a former Jewish house-painter from Brooklyn, returned to rural life, tries to reunite his dispersed family on his land, but it will fall to his son to reinsert his mother within a recomposed order, by becoming a father in his turn. This story effects the transfer of values in connection with the problematic of Jewish existence in America. It takes up the thematic of village Jews, without the confrontation of assimilation with political oppression as in the case of Poland. It dwells on an image of patriarchal life, reconstituted within the framework of a retreat far from the cities and from men. This isolation is historically authorized where it would prove impossible in the European situation. Moreover, it is morally justified (where the story “Willie” showed it as an inaccessible ideal) insofar as the norms of the Jewish collectivity are henceforth assimilated to the American standards of modern existence.
One may note to what extent Singer’s fundamental categories, since he left Europe, seem to overlap with the mythical division maintained by American literature between the innocence of primitive life and the degradation linked to the city, to modern life and its vulgarity, to the values of an egoistic individualism, to money… If the pantheistic vision is not new in Singer, one notes nonetheless that it lends itself more and more to clear-cut oppositions between nature and a certain form of sociability. In “Willie,” this sociability was still linked to the traditional mode of life of the shtetl, through the intermediary of the father, attached to orthodoxy and to habits of life that he reconstitutes almost entirely in America. Yet in that story already, the passage between the European little town and the existence of American Jews was being broached, by way of a situation that recurs precisely in the later story: the intrusion of summer vacationers onto the farmer’s land. The essential difference between the two narratives lies in the inversion that gives the stifling situation on which “Willie” closes an unexpected solution in the plot of the later narrative: the intruders are ousted and the world of nature closes back over a restored family order.
The vision of the world has undergone transformations linked to time and to the greater distance separating the present from the European past. A generation has passed since the emigrant set foot in America: the farmer, Sholem Melnik, has a son, a “real American,” who, while sharing his father’s passion for the land, is nonetheless very far from his language, his culture, his memories. Reality, even in its most “naturalized” form, is mixed, with the father who speaks a mixture of Yiddish, Polish and English, strewn from time to time with quotations in Hebrew, while moreover handling the plow with real competence, and the son, obstinately answering only in English (and not always in the choicest terms), understanding nothing of the language of the Bible, “the old stuff,” which he associates with the distant country his father speaks of. “Why did you come to America if everything was better over there?” he asks him.
On the other side, on the side of the cities: the farmer’s wife, his daughter, his mother-in-law, his brothers-in-law and all the American middle-class that is consolidating itself by burying its emigrant past; the worst epithet is the one that designates the greenhorn, the recent immigrant, and the greatest compliment, the new patent of nobility, is to be “American,” or, failing that, to have given birth to American children. Everything that evokes the Old World is assimilated to outdated values, like the synagogue, followed closely by the landslayt7 and the traditional hierarchies (the prestige of the scholars, of men, etc.), against which are set the commonplaces of American individualism: making one’s way up the social ladder, adopting the new criteria of sociability (“ladies first”), and above all having a business that pays (bizness). The only positive mark of attachment to the Jewish collectivity is the one that encompasses a rather vague entity, evoking a life conforming to everyone else’s and a neighborhood sociability: to be Jewish thus means, in this case, to live among other Jews and to inhabit New York (or, more precisely, Williamsburg8).
One thus sees that Singer, with the satirical ferocity that characterizes him, now dissociates two aspects that he still envisaged as linked through the figure of the father in “Willie”: attachment to the traditional values and to Jewish orthodoxy, on the one hand, and communal sociability, on the other. In relation to the rather negative figure of the father in “Willie,” the present text valorizes the routine fidelity of the old father-in-law to the past: he joins his son-in-law in his condemnation of the deeds and gestures of the feminine branch of the family, too attached to the gaudy values of American life.
Thus, to a Jewish culture without Judaism is opposed a paradoxical form of fidelity at the very heart of nature, following a problematic that was broached in “Willie” but that there remained at the positivity of oblivion. Here, on the contrary, oblivion — all-powerful in the new American reality — is sometimes compensated by a form of memory of adaptation and transfer, in which nature, far from opposing it, participates. Thus it falls to the farmer and his son to preserve this memory, in the face of the accelerated power of erosion of modern society. Nature here recovers its aspect as a reservoir of slower forms of existence, and it is its unifying power of restoration that is invoked here, in the face of the fragmentation of modern existence. Thus, as in “Willie,” nature furnishes the man who lives within it a vision of continuity that the collectivity of his “fellows” is no longer in a position to offer him. For the Americanized heir of the Polish dorfsyidn, the land and the sky are better markers of identity than the degraded collectivity around him. Yet, unlike Willie, Sholem Melnik — who apparently enjoyed some instruction in the “old country” — is capable of associating this pantheistic feeling of nature with a hymn to the Creator in the words of the holy tongue. The associations of memory come more easily, perhaps insofar as Singer has effected a separation between the ancestral religion and a detested communal sociability. Thus the splendor of the Catskill landscape evokes for the farmer not only the land of Europe, but also the pious images of childhood at the kheyder9 and the mountain of Sinai which he has never seen. What is more, these scraps of memory, preserved with a feeling of spontaneous religiosity, he pours out just as they are, without particular adornment but with constancy, upon his son, of whom he cannot reasonably expect that he will understand them; it is for the child to find his way among them. It is a sort of rather unconscious wager, but rendered possible by the love that binds father and son. Thus one also sees the antagonism of the generations inverted, to the benefit of an antagonism of the sexes. In this story, the men are in solidarity throughout three generations against the women, likewise united in opposed values.
Far from being an obstacle, nature thus preserves a minimal form of cultural memory, insofar as it likewise preserves individual identity. The mysterious life of nature is the only one still to evoke the idea of the sacred, present of old in the religion of childhood, and completely effaced from the degraded reality of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie. By the same processes of transfer, the patriarchal life proper to the old Jewish life in Europe and threatened with crumbling under the conditions of modern existence appears bizarrely closer to the culture of American farmers and to the rhythms of peasant life. Conjugal cohesion, the woman’s submission to her husband and to the common life, the subjection of individuals to the immutable laws of the land are part of this image sought within a reality of which nature is the guarantor, in the face of the loosening of family ties and the absence of any norm other than profit and pleasure reigning over American life. Thus Singer — insofar as he adheres in any way to the desires of his characters — here makes himself a moralist, in accents that seem to us coherent with his vision of woman, a certain misogyny and a conservative tendency less and less dissimulated.
The characters of the story are distributed along a line of force separating the simple natures, united with nature and with creatures, from the contrived, vulgar or inauthentic natures. The principal opposition plays out between Ben, the farmer’s son, and Harold, a sort of buffoon serving as handyman on the farm, transformed into a hotel by the young man’s mother. The figure of the counterfeiter is here profoundly associated with the vulgar Americanization of American Jews. He is the absolute foil to another form of identity, represented by Ben’s original position. The latter no longer has any of the traditional traits of the East European Jew. In this sense, he indeed incarnates an irremediable loss in relation to ancestral culture. He consequently has all the superficial attitudes of the young generation born in America and is hardly distinguishable, in this respect, from his younger sister, his mother’s natural ally. The great difference lies in a different form of oblivion (or of memory), symbolized by his attachment to his father and to the austere life they share. It is by his proximity to what most intimately binds his father to his past — the land and its permanence — by this force of love that renders him receptive and attentive to a voice, however tenuous, evoking time and its passages, that he proves apt to accomplish the transition between epochs and places. His goodness and his attachment to all forms of life, including the humblest, have something that evokes, by a sort of automatic association, an entirely profane Hasidism. But conversely, he in no way shares his father’s weakness and disapproves of the conjugal compromises that allow his mother to live far from them or to flirt with the head waiter. This humble and submissive attitude of the farmer, linked to the setbacks of Americanization, gives way in his son to a naïve self-confidence, a juvenile faith in a social order modeled on nature. This point of view could evoke a rather reactionary vision, were it not associated with the more complex image of an order reconstituted from the margin.
Curiously indeed, the ultimate stage of restoration of harmony, in this story — one of the rare ones in Singer to evoke, as of old “The Sands” (Zamd)10 did, a reconciliation of the human actors — resides in the resumption of the image of bastardy.
It is the birth of a “natural” child that seals this reintegration of the characters into an order that owes nothing to a traditional Jewish vision, but that is nonetheless a response to the impasses of Americanization. The child is illegitimate in the sense that he issues from ties that no longer have anything to do with a social or religious authority, but unlike so many other symbolic figures of bastardy in Singer, the child is recognized and founds a new configuration within the farmer’s disunited family.
The amorous ties between Ben and Opale, the slightly simple-minded young girl who laughs a childlike laugh and speaks English with the French intonations of Canada, represent an absolute degree of strangeness. They manifest the young man’s marginality, attest to his mutant side, his estrangement from any norm, not only Jewish but quite simply social. What attracts him above all is this same strangeness that characterizes the young girl and her whole family, as if he saw in it a sort of analogy with his own situation. He is the only one to frequent these people whose origin no one knows but who are accused of the worst vices and from whom everyone keeps their distance. For the farmers, they represent a different “race,” “Southern,” “French”; for the Americanized Jews, and in particular Ben’s mother, the young girl is merely a “shikse,” a non-Jew, and moreover a servant. In everyone’s eyes, these marginals bear witness to an abnormal proximity with primitive forces: the father stuffs dead animals and lives amid carrion, the sons look like simpletons, the only daughter of the house, Opale, is suspected of being bound to them by incestuous ties…
Socially, they are distinguished by their ambiguous position: they neither own nor cultivate land, they do not go to church on Sunday, they nonetheless have grand airs, the pride of the déclassé, “good manners.” It is thus this extreme marginality that, united with Ben’s solitude, is transformed indisputably, with the birth of the child, into a new “innocence,” that of an earthly Eden. This fusion of the most extreme differences into a unity recognized by men signifies the acceptance of strangeness as a place inhabitable by the dispersed members of the human community. If it manifests a path radically opposed to the criteria of Judaism, it nonetheless seems preferable, in this story, to an identity founded on shoddy values, such as the superficial Americanization of the Jews of Brooklyn appears to be. Singer, in this sense, opts for individual identity to the detriment of that of the group. He does not seek to present models acceptable in the eyes of the collectivity, but to indicate points of absolute fusion of contradictions, through an irreducible singularity. These are moments of vertical plunge into elementary life, where the usual separations seem able to abolish themselves and give way to a simple affirmation of existence. Yet Singer does not stop at this sole “deterritorialization.” The recognition of the child as “legitimate” announces a renewed and recomposed family order. The family redisposes itself around this new center, as if its organization could thereby escape the whirlwind of acculturation. The woman in Singer thereby loses what appeared essentially as a false freedom (her emancipation), and returns then to her “duties.” But if one may cast doubt on this return to a quite problematic order, one will not forget what intimately founds it, this renewed hope of life, which affirms itself in these late texts as the fundamental value of a work convulsed by History and exile.
Notes
Friling un andere dertseylungen [Spring and Other Stories], Warsaw, Brzoza editions, 1937.↩︎
In particular in “The Gold Diggers,” Tsukunft, Oct.–Dec. 1927.↩︎
Dertseylungen [“Stories”], New York, Matones, 1949.↩︎
Shtol un Ayzn, roman fun der tsayt fun der ershter velt-milkhome, birger-krig un revolutsie in Rusland (By Iron and by Fire, a novel of the time of the First World War, the civil war and the revolution in Russia), Vilna, Kletskin, 1927.↩︎
“Willie,” p. 76.↩︎
Stories, op. cit.↩︎
Immigrants come from the same little town, grouped in associations.↩︎
Jewish quarter of Brooklyn.↩︎
Religious primary school.↩︎
Perl un andere dertseylungen (Pearls and Other Stories), Warsaw, Kultur-Lige, 1922.↩︎