The question of infidelity is matricial in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, as in modern Yiddish literature generally. Born of the cultural choices of its authors, who opt for writing in “jargon” and use the vernacular language in preference to Hebrew or the co-territorial languages, this literature, from the work of the classic authors at the end of the nineteenth century, is inscribed from the outset under the sign of transgression, and its language is very often compared by the writers themselves to a woman: a desired mistress, diverting the homage destined for the legitimate wife, the Hebrew language, venerated but judged unfit to render contemporary subjectivity and everydayness.
In Singer (1904-1991), the linguistic and cultural choices are reflected upon in dramatized fashion by a fictionality that plays on connivance with the traditional world from which the writer issues, as well as on openness to the motif of transgression, founder of creativity. Familiar always with rabbinic culture through his family milieu, he becomes passionate about mysticism and its popular derivations. The Kabbalah, the traditional books of morals, the Hasidic anecdotes, the tales and customs tied to Ashkenazi folklore furnish a chosen terrain for his inspiration. This aspect of cultural nourishment is reinforced in him by a quite particular attraction to messianism and antinomianism, in particular Sabbateanism and Frankism, as well as to sorcery, demonology, occultism, parapsychology.
Singer thus deliberately articulates the notion of infidelity in its cultural dimensions, constantly illuminating the bond between fidelity and election, obedience to the commandments and memory, transgression and forgetting. The covenant between Israel and its God is analogous to the fidelity between wife and husband, as in the mystical interpretation of the Song of Songs. Adultery, a major transgression, on a par with idolatry, incest, and murder, is par excellence the cipher of disorder, of a derangement implicating the individual and the collectivity. In the biblical text, it symbolizes Israel’s prostitution to idols, is associated with the mad and the senseless in Proverbs, is punishable by death in the legislative texts. However, the sacred text itself poses the question of transgression in contradictory terms, through the deeds of the cultural heroes, in the image of David, who obtains Bathsheba at the price of murder and adultery and inaugurates the lineage of the future redeemer, the Davidic Messiah.
The historical messianisms radicalize this intricacy of meaning and the complex dialectic of the notion of infidelity: aroused by a fervent expectation inscribed within the Jewish tradition, they erupt on the basis of unstable sociological data, often dissimulating the boldness of unprecedented speculations beneath the covering of fidelity to the cultural and religious statements. The two most important movements in the Ashkenazi context, Sabbateanism in the seventeenth century and Frankism in the eighteenth, both end with the conversion of the false messiahs, Sabbatai Tsevi to Islam and Jacob Frank to Catholicism, dragging behind them a part of their “faithful” into a sectarian existence, a form of Marranism within the very heart of the Orthodox world. Those who are called the “believers” are reviled by orthodoxy on a par with heretics and converts. Jews in appearance, they nonetheless adopt a doctrinaire corpus and specific rituals, feeding the most fantastic rumors as to their debauched and impious practices.
Isaac Bashevis Singer devoted several novels and numerous short stories to the exploration of this gray zone of beliefs where piety and transgression, fidelity and infidelity exchange their qualities in such a way that it becomes difficult to discern them. While one cannot doubt the authenticity of his approach and his intimate knowledge of traditional religiosity, one quickly perceives that the statement of infidelity covers in him a multitude of values, both at the level of autobiographical transposition and at that of writing in Yiddish. His known biases—the choice to bring sexuality to light, including in the evocation of traditional society, the erudite cultural play, the rewriting, as well as the ultimate ambivalence of the meaning to be accorded to the narrative—sketch a complex landscape where the apparent fidelity to style, to the source-text, to learned orality, in fact dissimulates the boldness of an individual questioning ever more deepened, constantly renewed by the richness of fictional invention. Singer moreover describes himself as a blasphemer, a false messiah guided by the will to power, using the resources of a virtuoso writing to subjugate the crowd and attract love: the only compensations for the severance from the sphere of piety and traditional sacrality.
Adultery, systematically practiced by Singer’s characters, is par excellence the paradigm of transgression within a universe that remains backed against fidelity to the Law. A Janus-faced theme, it implies its own reversal, at the level of the reflexivity of the texts, by way of fidelity to the literality of the cultural statements; to the point that the obsession with error, with forgetting, with loss becomes one of the major leitmotifs of the work. The rich traditional semanticism of the notion innervates the inspiration of a multitude of texts evoking the tight-knit community of the Jewish small town, where conduct is normed by rabbinic law and ritual observance. In the texts where this structure of order is no longer present—the texts of American emigration, for example, or those of identitary isolation tied to the growing individualism of a Jewish society in the process of assimilation—adultery becomes the cipher of exile, of the loss of identity, of modern straying.
The Communal Horizon
Singer’s first novel, Satan in Goray (Sotn in Goray in Yiddish), written in Poland in 1933, establishes a series of homologies that structure the novelistic vision of traditional society and the implicit values of the work to come. A historical novel opening on the Cossack massacres of 1648 in Poland, in the course of which the Jewish communities are massively destroyed, it depicts essentially the messianic crisis of 1666 tied to the name of Sabbatai Tsevi: a crisis that inflamed nearly the entirety of the Jewish world of the time and very nearly provoked a major schism in the traditional faith. Through the construction of the narrative, Singer sets in parallel the external aggression, factor of material and moral ruin of the collectivity, and the aftermath of the historical trauma, which seems to make the bed of the internal disorders, of the religious disorientation, and of the intense movement of messianic fervor that seizes Goray. This prototypical small town of the Lublin region symbolizes, in the novel, Polish Judaism in crisis. The evocation of the decline of the elites accompanies that of the rise of new social strata, in quest of power and prestige. To the figures of the rabbi and of the old notable of the shtetl are opposed the new chiefs of the Sabbatean sect, who infiltrate society and flatter the leanings of the crowd, proposing to it a popular messianism and reactivating the desires of enjoyment and of revenge usually held in check by the Law. At the heart of the narrative, the female figure is the center of attraction of the transgressive desires, introducing trouble and ambiguity into a universe in mutation. To the lack of firmness of the spiritual chief of the small town, progressively seized by religious doubt and ultimately vanquished by evil (the “demons”), echoes the psychological fragility of the female character, Rechele, who excites the covetousness of the Sabbatean chiefs, the ascetic Itche Mates and the demagogue-tribune Gedaliya. First married to the former, she is seduced by the latter, when her first husband turns into an emissary of the new faith. Adultery is consequently the initial link in the exit from orthodoxy; it is extolled as a commandment by sectarian antinomianism, associated with the conducts of ritual inversion tied to the Sabbatean ideology: the chiliastic statement of “redemption through sin” is amply embroidered, in association with the demonic thematics that translate the hold of revolutionary messianism over the crowd. The multiple semantic associations of the notion of adultery (debauchery, lust, unions against nature, incest, apostasy…) are amply varied by the novelistic intrigue, principally centered on collective conducts, but also very detailed in the examination of psychic pathologies, principally as concerns Rechele. Traumatized during her childhood by the massacres, abandoned to herself, instructed in unusually learned fashion in matters of religious texts, in Hebrew and even in Latin, Rechele represents hysterical anomie. Her savagery, her epileptic crises isolate her from the collectivity, subject her to masculine power and desire, then hurl her into mystical ecstasy and finally deliver her to demonic “possession.” A prophetess of the Sabbatean sect, revered on a par with a “holy woman,” like Sarah, a former prostitute become the wife of Sabbatai Tsevi, she passes at the end of the novel for possessed, before being exorcised, in dramatic fashion, of the dybbuk (reincarnated soul) that has taken possession of her body. Her death seals the small town’s return to orthodoxy, at the term of the failure of the awaited redemption.
The epic narration of Satan in Goray individualizes rather little the evocation of the conducts and motivations of the characters. The situation of exception associated with the messianic crisis, the demonological statement that symbolizes human disorder, the distanced impersonality of the narration operate a form of objectivation of the transgressive thematics, leaving to the reader the task of accomplishing the linkages of meaning and interpretation. The narrative ends, however, on a distinct epilogue, taken up by an alternative narrator, who recodes its ambiguity through an edifying discourse, mimetic of the traditional style. The characters, with their ambivalent opacity, become the actors of a pious fable, written by a scribe in the aftermath of the crisis in order to turn the “sinners” away from messianic impatience. The “penitents” who have made their return to orthodoxy are held up as an example, the strayed woman is taken in hand by the collectivity and purged of her “demon,” the apostate is rejected forever from the frameworks of the community, his name, like that of the false messiah, is doomed to oblivion and to malediction. In appearance, the novel ends on this communal “slice of life,” provided of course one forgets the polysemous irony, the carnivalesque ambiguity, the grotesque derision that characterize the enunciative regime of the principal narrative. Fidelity to the text of the Law overlays, without obscuring it, the cruel blackness of the realist painting, with its charge of modern denunciation of traditional society. The regime of duplicity characterizes Singer’s writing, constantly polyphonic, two-faced, in the image of its author, at once faithful and unfaithful to the cultural signifiers of which he is the bearer through the language of his fiction.
The thematically very close short story entitled The Destruction of Kreshev is, however, very different in its narrative mode, its spatio-temporal frame, its exploration of the characters’ interiority. Much less historical, even if it is situated in a relatively indeterminate past, “long” after the Sabbatean crisis, but with a form of atemporality more characteristic of the short story (here almost a tale), it ties in much more significant fashion, essentially thanks to the economy of narrative means, adultery to the destruction of values, all the way to the ultimate annihilation of the frame of reference, the traditional small town. The carnivalesque thematics is consequently still more emphasized, insofar also as the narration is taken up, in ironic fashion, by the spirit of evil itself, the yeytser-hore [evil inclination], bent on the perdition of humans. His first-person narrative is deliberately placed under the sign of malignity, of psychological deepening, of the Machiavellian configuration of an intrigue plotting, through ruse and seduction, the ruin of the cultural order. The subjectivity of the demonic narrator, animated by a point of view completely implicated in the story and dominating the scene from its sarcastic remove, thanks to its paradoxical and extra-lucid knowledge of the human psyche, as well as to its humor establishing connivance with the reader (fictively the listener), inscribes the short story in a register of complex motivations, in a deliberate play of mirrors between fantastic narrativity and fictional modernity.
The short story sets up the same actantial structure as the novel: a rich young girl, spoiled by her father, too instructed for a woman, and yet pious and good, is led to every excess from the moment of her marriage with a young scholar, a secret disciple of Sabbatai Tsevi. Plotted in appearance by the spirit of evil, the intrigue establishes itself in reality on a series of psychological concatenations and subjective determinations much more apparent than in Satan in Goray. At the outset, the statement of a commonplace taken up by the demon-narrator, a veritable misogynist axiom, establishes the connection between women and evil, all the more so when it is a question of the daughter of a well-off family, in a wretched Jewish small town. It is filial obedience that seems to be at the source of the future dysfunctions: Lise, the young girl, enjoined to choose a fiancé, prefers the poor scholar to the rich young man, believing thus to obey faithfully the paternal desire and values. Moreover, she falls in love with her betrothed even before the marriage, bringing into play the imagination, source of all ills, an incomparable weapon offered to Satan by the complexity of human nature. Finally, the marriage, far from putting a term to this “deranged” love in the light of traditional norms, on the contrary fans it (Satan helping!), through the complex intervention of perversion: if sexual desire is clearly attributed to the woman, the desire for profanation is for its part rather masculine, from the moment when observance of the commandments gives way to the derangement of language:
There are beings for whom the satisfaction of their desires does not suffice. They need in addition to pronounce all sorts of useless words and to wallow in thought in lust. Those who follow this detestable path inevitably sink into melancholy and cross the Forty-Nine Gates of impurity. The sages have said from time immemorial that everyone knows why a young girl comes to take her place beneath the nuptial canopy—but that whoever profanes the conjugal act with obscene words loses his place in the world to come.1
Lise’s adultery with her father’s coachman, encouraged at the outset by the perverse imagination of her husband, whose latent homosexuality the text moreover suggests, leads to the ruin not only of the protagonists, but of the entire small town. As in Satan in Goray, the individual transgressions are regulated by the collectivity. Its responses pass through the rigorous application of the Law, with a view to the reparation of the individuals and of the community, struck in its entirety by a deviance presented as major and over-coded by the heretical risk. In the novel, the exorcism that drives the dybbuk from Rechele’s body at the price of her life introduces the solemnity and the catharsis proper to a rather archaizing and stylized vision of the collectivity; in the short story, in connection with the carnivalesque realism of the narrative, it is the obscene ritual of the charivari that is supposed to produce the effect of contrition and repentance on the part of the guilty. In both cases, the narration, through its ambiguity, its effects of neutrality, its underlying irony, accommodates the double interpretation: the one that gives its due to the traditional conducts of regulating deviance through sanction, rite, and penance; but also the one that denounces the communal violence exercised in privileged fashion upon women, whose death scans, each time, the end of the narrative. In these dramatic moments of confrontation between transgressive desire and the Law, the painting of social cruelty, of the relaxed morality of the communal microcosm, and of the hypocritical indignation of its members indicate sufficiently the duplicitous register of Singer’s text, which makes the statement of traditional values and individualist revolt coexist in the imaginary space of the narrative. If Goray seems to escape ruin thanks to the exorcism ritually accomplished, Kreshev on the contrary is sullied by violence, the desire for social revenge, the ultimate suicide of Lise, buried on the other side of the cemetery fence, in unconsecrated ground. In both texts, the husband does penance and weeps for his wife despite the divorce to which rabbinic law has constrained him. Conversely, the adulterous lover hardens in his attitude of rebellion and exits the Jewish frame, through apostasy or vengeance. The two texts end on the transmission of the narrative become legend: a story of possession and of return to the right path, in the image of the messianic aberration, but also, in the words of Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, of which these texts are sometimes very close: a “tale of human frailty and sorrow.” Like the scarlet letter that becomes “the type of something to be sorrowed over, an object at once of horror-stricken awe and reverence2,” the tomb of Lise is visited by the women, a usage, the short story concludes, that survives to this day.
Kreshev, in all likelihood set on fire by Mendel the coachman, stricken by epidemics and poverty, is condemned to decline, in the image of the Polish Jewish community, whose fall, by way of the historical statement, is referred at once to external violence and to internal dysfunctions: “To this day, it has remained a very poor small town. It was never rebuilt as it once was. And all this because of the sins committed by a husband, his wife, and a coachman.3” Only the narrative remains, assuming its demonic and transgressive share, like Singer’s narration.
Inner Abysses
The extension of the notion of infidelity to that of apostasy, broached in these two texts by way of the evocation of messianic heresy, is approached directly in numerous other narratives. The short story The Plumed Crown is certainly the most troubling, the most beautiful, the most ambiguous among these narratives devoted to the change of belief, the gravest infidelity that the traditional context can know, even if there too, the path of “return” is never definitively barred.
The plumed crown that gives the narrative its title is, like the scarlet letter in Hawthorne, a polysemous and fecund symbol at the level of fictional invention. A magical object or an inner vision, forged by the devil or proof of divine miracles, truth or fiction, it is above all evanescent and fragile, like a handful of down clutched between the fingers that refuse to let go, like the truth, “complex and hidden,” that eludes human comprehension. Two-faced, like Singer’s writing, the plumed crown is alternately surmounted by a tiny cross of down and by the divine Tetragrammaton. An ambiguous sign, it also designates the splitting of the female character, Akhsa, whose itinerary resembles that of Rechele and of Lise. Marked first by intimate division, hesitation between beliefs, between parental figures, between existential choices, it issues onto conversion then onto return and penance, before the liberating death, with no explicit sign to designate a truth that proves impossible to grasp within the space of the narrative. Faced with the ambiguity of the signs, the responses proposed by penitential rigorism prove particularly unbearable. If religious infidelity can be repaired by the conducts of repentance agreed upon by the Law, infidelity to a promise of marriage proves otherwise complex to expiate within the narrative frame, insofar as it brings into play the ambiguity of desires. Because she refused to marry the one designated for her according to the requirements of Jewish society, in order to turn toward a Christian marriage, Akhsa commits a redoubled form of transgression: not only through her own marriage, but also because her betrothed, who married two other women in succession and tortured them to death, is himself guilty, according to the letter of the law, of a symbolic form of adultery, through the violence of the repressed desires he maintains within the legitimate space of marriage. The rigor of the expiation is commensurate with the subtlety of the fault: even though the collectivity stipulates only the remarriage of the former betrothed to repair the initial transgression, the new husband for his part demands a pitiless application of the Law: through incessant macerations, he drives Akhsa to death. The interpretation of this extreme conduct is, there again, particularly ambiguous, exploring anew this gray zone where piety and fanaticism exchange themselves in vertiginous fashion: is Zemach a figure of the ascetic and of penitential sainthood, or simply a sadistic and violent pervert? Does he love Akhsa with a love incomprehensible to moderns, or is he finally nothing but a demon, bent on human misfortune? Does Akhsa die as a holy woman or as a skeptic, inhabited to the end by doubt and despair? The truth of the text eludes us, like the plumed crown with its evanescent and fleeting aspects.
In the short story The Phantom, a slightly different variant appears. The narrative is taken up by the women, the aunt Yentl and the narrator’s mother, a sign of inflection of the narrative rigor, but also of a rather ironic form of antifeminism at the level of the framing discourse:
The women were speaking of divorces, of broken promises of marriage, of abandoned fiancées, and my aunt Yentl said: “One has no right to humiliate a Jewish girl. There is a saying: ‘Better to cut a parchment than to tear a paper.’ You probably know what that means. Marriage contracts are written on paper, and certificates of divorce on parchment. It is less of a sin to divorce than not to honor an engagement of marriage.”4
The rest of the narrative illustrates the opening saying: the story of a promise of marriage broken by a frivolous young man, who leaves the young girl wounded to the point of being unable to marry another man. On her wedding night, the phantom of her first fiancé interposes itself between the new spouses and prevents the consummation of the marriage. The young woman converts and becomes a cloistered nun. Belying the superstitious interpretation of the aunt, who makes the phantom a demon, the narrator’s mother, Bathsheba, concludes, in her at once pious and finely psychological way: “A dybbuk speaks, cries, moans, and one can therefore exorcise it. Despair is silent, and it is from there that it draws its disquieting power.5” The relative firmness of the story’s moral is nonetheless counterbalanced by the inner abysses it brings to light. Traditional society has the means to curb the voice of the dybbuk through the spectacular ceremonial it sets in place, and which, in certain cases, is apt to cure the very real pathologies that popular belief covers, as well as its lot of symptoms attested by tradition. But faced with silent despair, with unspeakable inhibition, with the phantom body interposing itself at the heart of conjugal intimacy, the Law too falls silent, and only the narrative gives an account of it.
The Temptation of Evil
This avowal of impotence of the collective proves particularly clear in certain narratives where the demonic entity triumphs, at the term of a bitter combat in the course of which the individuals are tested in their fidelity to an enigmatic and somber law, as ambiguous as the evil powers it combats. In The Black Wedding, the quasi-incestuous fidelity between father and daughter manifests itself through the melancholic inheritance, the esoteric instruction, the ambiguity of sexual identity (a daughter who behaves like a son!), the hysterical symptoms of the young girl. To be faithful to the promise she made to her father to perpetuate his pious (or obsessional, as the case may be!) combat against evil, Hindele has only a single recourse, imposed by her father in his struggle against the demons: to keep silent, not to “open her mouth before the Sotn [Satan].” She must refuse the social pact, give no pledge to her arranged marriage, intended solely to increase the prestige of the Hasidic lineage, pronounce no word of assent, not even a cry during her childbirth. In a bold reversal of the pious symbolism, the injunction to silence can from then on appear as the metaphor of the incestuous secret, with its unconscious law issuing onto madness and the loss of reality. It is the whole of Jewish life, with its rituals and its traditional prescriptions, that thus appears struck with inversion by the motif of the demonic marriage. In an impressive accumulation of parallelisms, Singer inverts the signs, drawing the nightmarish tableau of individual psychosis and of the decline of the collective. Behind the “black wedding,” it is the topos of the witches’ sabbath that sets itself in place, but it is also the shadow of the madness present at the heart of tradition: “While she saw herself seated in her mother’s parlor, she knew that in reality she was in a forest. It seemed to be day, in reality it was night. Hasidim in fur-trimmed hats and satin caftans pressed around her, as well as women in velvet capes and silk bonnets, but all that belonged to pure imagination; these fine garments concealed shaggy heads, webbed feet, navels that had nothing human about them, snouts…6”
The devout struggle against evil consists in refusing to sacrifice to idolatry: “a single friendly word addressed to Satan is equivalent to offering a sacrifice to the idols.7” It is only at the moment of the sufferings of childbirth that the young woman breaks this pact of silence, of fidelity to the paternal figure, in a dramatic equivalent of the fall and of conversion:
A piercing cry sprang from her throat, and the darkness engulfed her. Bells were ringing, as for a Christian feast. A hellfire sprang up, red as blood, as the skin of a leper. The earth opened and Hindele’s canopied bed began to sink into the abyss. She had lost everything, in this world and in the world to come.8
But whereas the whole of the narrative lends credence to the supernatural, in conformity with the beliefs of the female character, braced against her faith and her oedipal fidelity, the fall restores the point of view of exteriority, that of the group, of an objective narrator: “In Tzivkev and the surrounding area, the news spread that Reb Simon of Yampol had just had a son. Hindele, the mother, had died in childbirth.9” Singer’s art reveals here all its paradoxical, almost Sabbatean ambiguity, by imposing anew its binocular vision of the traditional world. Demonic, when it reveals its underside, its carnivalesque lining; tragic and mad, when it institutes a literal fidelity to the paradoxical letter of the law, from the moment when the latter is innervated by a powerful current of desire, a deadly adhesion to the paternal signifiers.
We find the same ambiguity in the short story The Jew from Babylon (Der yid fun Bovl10), whose eponymous character wages an incessant combat against evil and finds himself excluded from the community, delivered to the power of the demons. A supposed member of a Sabbatean sect, he wanders at the margins of the Jewish world, healing the sick and using his thaumaturgic power in the service of the collectivity. His solitary death, preceded by an episode of carnivalesque summoning of the demonic personnel, evokes the topos of the black wedding and ends on the same notion of an almost Icarian fall of the character. As for the demonic monologue, it knows its most cruelly ironic form in the Diary of One Not Born (A togbukh fun a nit geboyrenem11), where a playful and perverse narrator, born of the solitary masturbations of a yeshiva student, practices with jubilation infidelity and deception among the inhabitants of the small town. Before leading the soul of his “father” to hell, he reveals to him that good sense is the most cunning and most wicked of demons, inverting anew the reassuring messages of traditional morality. In Zeidlus the Pope12, the ironic narrator, the yeytser-hore, recounts how he managed to convert a Jewish scholar, Reb Zeidl, to the faith of the Christians, by bringing into play his sole passion, pride, and by making him believe that he could thus become pope. The Jewish character breaks all his ties with the collectivity, and ends by dying blind and wretched, without having known the glory to which he laid claim. Before being hurled into hell, he nonetheless finds an ultimate appeasement in observing the reality of the world of demons: if it exists, there also exists an opposite principle, positing a superior justice.
The Accounts Kept of Freedom
For such indeed is the interrogation that these texts traversed by the thematics of infidelity profile. If there is betrayal and renunciation, is it the proof that there exists “a justice and a judge,” or on the contrary the attestation of chaos and chance? Singer’s characters undergo the experience of free will and of evil, so as to test, through this form of inner revelation, the space of their freedom at the same time as the tangible reality of the principle of retribution. Temptation and the fall are associated with the Promethean desire to experience the totality of the real, whatever the price. The popular Yiddish adage often summoned synthesizes it in imaged fashion: “if you cannot go over, go under.” The tempter discourse of the demon recalls it also to the protagonist in the short story A Man Forgets, but His Pocket Remembers13: “Have no fear, then. There is no law below, no judge above.” The question of forgetting is directly tied to infidelity in this short story. After having nearly yielded to the temptation of the flesh, the character is as if struck with amnesia, unable to remember the use of a sum of money that is missing. The account no longer balances, neither with oneself, nor with God, nor with men. The angel of forgetting arouses doubt, guilt, the feeling of unworthiness. It is only in dream that the character will experience the underground survival of an unconscious memory, which delivers to him the key to his forgetting and attests to the existence of an order recording the consequences of individual acts. There again, the proverb, the collective wisdom translate a profound psychological truth: “a man forgets, but his pocket remembers,” the accounts are settled unbeknownst to consciousness, in the obscurity of the psyche, where Singer sees the analogue of the principle of divine omniscience: “If a pocket is capable of remembering, what to say of the Almighty, about whom it is written: ‘There is no forgetting before the throne of Thy glory.’14” In this short story, as in the “Hasidic” anecdote entitled Savings for Paradise15, the edifying tale seems to have replaced the grating irony of the demon’s monologues. To the character who let himself be seduced by his sister-in-law, adding incest to adultery, the animals appear enviable precisely because, having no free will, they accomplish their passage on earth with “simplicity and fidelity.”
The Ambiguous Tale of Fidelity
In connection with popular folklore, Singer develops the thematics of simplicity and fidelity in Gimpl tam (Gimpel the Fool16, in a translation too monosemous that does not do justice to the notion of tmimes in Yiddish, designating naïveté, but also the integrity of the tale-character that is the “simple one”). Certainly, Gimpel is simple in the pejorative sense of the term, the one fixed by the biblical book of Proverbs, which warns the fool against the adulterous woman in sentences without appeal: “Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death17” (these terms are moreover in the background of a pseudo-Hasidic text like Savings for Paradise, as is the comparison of the man who yields to the adulterous woman to an ox that one leads to the slaughter18). As usual, Singer’s text is polysemous, making the most antithetical messages coincide: the sarcastic irony lampooning the traditional small town, whose decline is prolonged by the “stupidity” of Gimpel, who accepts the marriage arranged for him (under pretext of safeguarding collective morality!) with a woman of notorious ill repute, already pregnant by another; but also the rehabilitation of the character of Gimpel, who reveals himself to be good and humble rather than truly naïve. One can even find, at the end of the tale, a veritable wisdom in this character, who transforms himself into a wandering vagabond, rich with such an experience of the world that truth and fiction become, in his eyes, relative: “I saw many things, many lies and many betrayals. But the more I went, the more I realized that they were not really lies. Anything can happen; if not to one, then to another; if not today, then next year or in a century…19” Imperceptibly, “the fool” transforms himself into a teller of Singer-stories, “stories of demons, of magicians… what do I know?20” As for the moral of the fable, it is worth citing in its entirety, so much does it synthesize the profoundly pessimistic, almost Buddhist philosophy, at the same time as the playful art, the ventriloquial voice, mixture of humor and self-derision, of Singer himself:
The world—that is certain—is nothing but illusion; only one thing is true: death. At the door of the barn where I lie, I see the litter on which the dead are carried away. The Jewish gravedigger holds his spade at the ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shroud is ready in my sack. Another wayfarer waits to lie down on my pallet of straw. When the moment has come, I shall depart with joy, for then it will be real, without stories, and there will be neither ridicule nor deception. God be praised! There, Gimpel himself could not be deceived.21
Notes
Isaac Bashevis Singer, La Destruction de Kreshev (The Destruction of Kreshev), in Le Spinoza de la rue du Marché (The Spinoza of Market Street), Paris, Denoël, 1997, p. 117. In Yiddish, Der khurbn fun Kreshev, in Der sotn fun Goray un andere dertseylungn, Tel Aviv, Peretz Farlag, 1992, p. 218.↩︎
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (cited from La Lettre écarlate, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1954, p. 366).↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, La destruction de Kreshev (The Destruction of Kreshev), op. cit., p. 158.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Le Fantôme (The Phantom), Paris, Stock, 2002, p. 363.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ibid., p. 381.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Le Mariage noir (The Black Wedding), in Le Spinoza de la rue du Marché (The Spinoza of Market Street), op. cit., p. 72.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ibid., p. 73.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ibid., p. 80.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ibid., p. 80.↩︎
Itzkhok Bashevis, Der yid fun Bovl, in Sotn in Goray, op. cit., pp. 309-319.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 253-270.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 269-286.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Le Fantôme (The Phantom), op. cit., p. 199.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Le Fantôme (The Phantom), op. cit., p. 200.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 222-253.↩︎
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimpel l’imbécile (Gimpel the Fool), Paris, Robert Laffont, 1966.↩︎
Proverbs 7:27.↩︎
Proverbs 7:22.↩︎
Ibid., p. 181.↩︎
Ibid., p. 182.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 182-183.↩︎