David Stromberg, trans. <i>Old Truths and New Clichés: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer</i> ; Isaac Bashevis Singer. David Stromberg, trans. <i>Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years 1939–1945</i> ; Isaac Bashevis Singer. Saul Bellow and D

David Stromberg’s recent collections of essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer finally allow readers of English to consider the much broader context of Bashevis as a public intellectual and cultural critic. Rather than the coy, Yiddish-accented, old-world persona always ready with quip that he played up at public events, in these volumes Bashevis emerges as a European intellectual, struggling with the purpose of literature, the role of Yiddish, and the meaning of life. He had hoped to publish an English selection of his essays on several occasions, including during the last years of his life under the working title God’s Fugitives, but the demands of fame and then frailty, interrupted these plans. Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939–1945 is a compact volume, the first of a series planned by White Goat Press, the imprint of the Yiddish Book Center. Its narrow chronological borders allow us to probe Bashevis’s response to the destruction of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewry from across the ocean, which proves invaluable to understanding how he struggled to make sense of the headlines in real time. Almost all of the essays included in the volume were published in New York’s Forverts under one of several pen names he used in Yiddish for his nonfictional writing (most frequently Yitskhok Varshavsky or D. Segal), allowing us a glimpse into the writer’s priorities before his reputation took off as the international literary sensation “Isaac Bashevis Singer.”Of more than 150 articles published by Bashevis between 1939 and 1945, Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt includes twenty-five, with the majority originally published in 1944–45. Stromberg’s editorial selections reflect the volume’s title, revealing Bashevis’s concern at this moment with both the future of Yiddish as a literary and cultural medium and with the transmission of yiddishkayt (Jewishness) to future generations. Bashevis feared that the world from which he had emerged was literally disappearing as he wrote, and his essays obsessively provide his Yiddish readers in America with lessons in traditional folkways and customs, from ruminations on the fate of agunot (women chained to their marriage due to the disappearance of their husbands) to insights on the relationship between dybbuks and modern psychology (“the lie soon became the truth”). Singer’s accounts of the spiritual rhythms that had most influenced traditional Jewish life should be seen as a response to the Holocaust as it was unfolding, and a preliminary wrestling with its theological challenges. Bashevis also does not hesitate to reflect on his own psychic condition at this particular moment. He gives voice to the trauma of his readers, and to the coming historical reckoning they will face:Bashevis acknowledges the uncanny divide between the care-free environment in New York and the horrors befalling Jewry in Europe, accepting that the paralysis of Jewish writers in America will not be dealt with sympathetically by future historians. In gesturing toward the limits of the imagination to respond to the murder of entire people, he already touches on a core challenge of the literature of destruction.That being said, the volume is most striking when Bashevis takes up the meaning of Yiddish in what would soon to be a world without its Yiddish-speaking heartland. The demise of Yiddish was a perennial concern of its proponents throughout most of Jewish modernity. Even in the interwar period, when Yiddish was the most spoken language in all of Jewish history, Yiddishists worried about rising linguistic acculturation into co-territorial languages and the growing threat from the Hebrew-speaking Yishuv in Palestine. But their fears were transformed into reality once the Nazis occupied Eastern Europe and put their genocidal plans into motion, given that their objective was not only the annihilation of Jews but also of their entire civilizational apparatus. Bashevis notes his impatience both with those who “tell sick people, over and over, that they’re in a bad situation” and with those who “create illusions for themselves.” Rather, he urges readers to soberly confront the moment, including the likelihood “that Yiddish will, in the future, not be the language of the masses” and the “risk that Yiddish will become a dead language, a language of books.” His proposal is a vast cultural rescue operation that calls for the collecting of Yiddish literature and the separating of the wheat from the chaff; the completion of a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary; the recording of the customs of Jewish cities and shtetls, and the gathering of thousands of Yiddish sayings and proverbs via landsmanshaft organizations before all of these linguistic and folk sources are forgotten (“The Yiddish That We Spoke in the Old Country Is Being Forgotten,” March 1944; “Yiddish Language and Culture Undergo Their Greatest Crisis in History,” December 1944). His own impotence was projected onto frustration with the inability of the New York offices of YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to take up the urgency of his vision.1Bashevis’s cultural pessimism also proved to be his opportunity. If Yiddish could no longer rely on living sources as inspiration for fiction, especially the contemporary American environment, the wellspring of Yiddish creativity necessarily would need to come from the traditional sources of the past—old Yiddish chapbooks, folklore, morality books, Hasidic wonder tales, and more. Singer’s religious background conveniently positioned him as the ideal interpreter of such a treasury. This is where his interest in Yiddish as an artistic tool and his understanding of Yiddishkayt as a mode of being intersect. If Yiddish literature had tried to prove its worldliness for the first half of the twentieth century, by the 1940s Bashevis saw this as a dead end: “Yiddish literature can only depict Yiddish-speaking Jews, and no others. . . . So despite the fact that Yiddish and Hebrew are little more than an insignificant part of what should be Jewish literature, together they actually constitute the backbone of Jewish literature. Their power is not in how widely they are read, but in their conception. . . . Only in Yiddish or in Hebrew are there fiction writers with a solid knowledge of Judaism” (“Jews and Jewish Life Not Yet Portrayed in Yiddish Literature,” July 1945). Bashevis here suggests that only a literature written in a Jewish language produces texts inspired by the library of Jewish civilization. In this sense, he is dismissive of a multilingual conception of modern Jewish literature that would include texts written in non-Jewish languages like German, Russian, or English; rather, the alef-beys itself is the most critical signifier of the rootedness of a text in both Jewish knowledge and experience.Bashevis concluded that the fundamental crisis in Jewish life in America was spiritual, by which he meant its untetheredness from traditional sources of knowledge and practices. No wonder, then, that he found English-language American Jewish writing lacking. He notes that “recent years have introduced, especially in America, a new type of Jew: one who knows nothing about Yiddishkayt. These Jews don’t deny that they’re Jewish, but they have no idea what it is, what obligations it brings to bear on them, and where it’s taking them.” He asserts that their writing is a “stutter of sorts,” rather than an expression of cultural self-confidence. And he determines that “Jewishness that’s not connected to the old sources, with their ancient aspirations and ideals, cannot spiritually maintain the Jews as a minority,” concluding that it is a “Judaism without vitality” (“Does Being Jewish Influence the Work of Jews Who Are American Writers?,” May 1944; “They Don’t Know Why They’re Jewish, but Don’t Want to Be Anything Else,” June 1944). In short, Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt offers contemporary readers a window into how Bashevis aggressively carved out a creative place for himself in America during a moment of unprecedented crisis by rejecting other American Yiddish writers, and before he was read outside of Yiddish circles. Old Truths and New Clichés is an entirely different volume, offering a selection of essays that Bashevis himself curated and translated (or selected for translation) into English once he was already a literary sensation. In many ways they reveal a dulling of Bashevis’s edge in order to maximize accessibility and reputation. Stromberg’s selections are representative, not comprehensive, and span decades of Bashevis’s essayistic writing. This prompts the editor to neatly divide them into distinct sections, including “The Literary Arts,” “Yiddish and Jewish Life,” and “Personal Writings and Philosophy,” though these divisions prove somewhat arbitrary since their concerns bleed into one another.When it comes to literature, Bashevis’s modernist experimentation early in his career in such works as Satan in Goray developed into a distaste for more extreme varieties of modernist and early post-modern experimentation that made reading less accessible and enjoyable. Though his neo-folk writing was, in fact, always a sophisticated form of modernist play, he was able to creatively betray his sources while still seeming loyal to them, even when his fellow Yiddish writers cried foul. The alleged “mask of originality” of contemporary writing prompted Singer to embrace “Old-Fashioned readers” as his ideal, those who understood the value of a dramatic plot and good story: “Children hold no respect for what is average or lacking in character. They are bored by the antihero. They aren’t interested in puzzling and tricky language. . . . Children don’t want authors to write down to them. . . . The so-called avant-garde art is so meager in plot and individuality because it is so boring” (“Literature for Children and Adults”). By pretending to be a simpler writer than he actually was, Bashevis establishes a challenge for his fellow Yiddish writers in America: “We do not have to be anxious about our voice being heard,” he suggests; “our worry should be whether our voice deserves to be heard” (“Yiddish and Jewishness”).Bashevis is at his sharpest when he takes on those who would demand of literature a confirmation of their own perspective. I found myself laughing out loud when reading through “The Ten Commandments and Modern Critics” (1965), in which he imagines how contemporary intellectuals would have responded to the tablets hewn by Moses. While the Communist critic sees the logic of the commandments directly linked to “the disintegration of the capitalist order,” the psychological critic reminds us of the limits to honoring thy father and thy mother given that “we know that parents are responsible for most of their children’s complexes”; while the progressive labor critic takes Moses to task for suggesting only a single day of rest while they are fighting for a four day workweek, the antisemitic critic sees “the commandments as the strongest possible indication of Jewish degeneracy and perversion.” What none of these critics are able to do, Bashevis suggests, is to understand the Commandments as a text that offers a compelling moral vision. Given the state of literary criticism today, oversaturated with jargon and overdetermined by politics, Bashevis anticipated the broader threat to humanistic discourse.The essays in Old Truths and New Clichés will be of some help to students and readers beginning their journey into Bashevis’s creative priorities, but I am not convinced they significantly shift our understanding of him as a writer. If anything, they are themselves replete with Singeresque clichés that underscore the careful construction of his public persona as a relic from another world who has positioned himself as the only reliable bridge between an extinct Eastern European past and its creative afterlife. David Stromberg’s critical apparatus that guides us through how these essays were transformed from Yiddish to English is the highlight of the volume. Housed at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center, more than eight hundred essays in the Singer archive constitute the significant corpus of his nonfiction writing. Stromberg sharpens for readers an insight (sometimes an accusation) that was already voiced by his contemporaries, by Singer critics, and by Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser in their 2014 documentary film The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer: by the 1960s Bashevis’s Yiddish writing was a way station to English and global fame. Singer was the driving agent of a determined translationary process, translating aloud while a collaborator recorded, or severely editing and correcting the translations of others, mostly women over whom he exercised some form of professional power. By the end of this collaborative endeavor the Yiddish Bashevis had not only been translated, but transformed into the worldly Isaac Bashevis Singer. For instance, Stromberg explores how the English essay “Who Needs Literature” first appeared in several installments in Yiddish in Forverts in 1963, each under a separate title. Though they were never brought together and published as a single essay in Yiddish, they were combined, significantly pared down, and then edited to produce a single, attenuated English version. Stromberg readers to several in the the on Bashevis’s editorial which in English more toward “the and the of his that he himself in Stromberg’s notes to both volumes of essays provide their and given his role as editor of Singer’s literary at he be to these to provide the critical they I more insight into how these essays us to the relationship between Yiddish, and what are they part of an Yiddish writers in America for over the meaning of And how are readers to his that the future of Yiddish fiction in a world that is These are a of that Stromberg could have in significantly more Stromberg’s translating from Bashevis’s to from to offers new insights into the relationship between these literary who was Bashevis’s was a Yiddish writer in own of the and Yet Bashevis’s reputation was by he made in his about his expression of And though he for New York’s he not his to a of In these from do not have Bashevis’s a more about their including about with as when acknowledges before much a written to Bashevis on his in a by him that he will make it through the from the Yiddish literary to that in New Bashevis have written to about his and with about to a living by writing for the Yiddish rather than on his him for it of literary the are several years in a over the fate of their mother and in Europe, which to have been their only while to about the fate of new While a significant of their relationship become like over these last Bashevis to with editor of to publish be a don’t put it Even the of their Singer in the most writer of the a to Bashevis literary concerns about of in the American Yiddish need the . . . only knows how new . . . I Only in a that does to Bashevis that in life been so has brought us God’s write will literally Given this it is that Bashevis could not of have that the with Bashevis in New he would with his only In a from the would much like to come to New York for a Bashevis not take up with He only once during a to in reveal that Bashevis some was when I a for of but what hoped for from him was that he would his to literary for good and for the of a in the But it’s for to it don’t By most he never these even without to Bashevis’s are not only a window into how creative took a significant on but the ways in which Bashevis the of Yiddish in New made on Bashevis comes out as a less than of never with a of where was only when he no longer had to with literary aspirations and that he would do not know of a single in Yiddish literature who than the essays and because they are themselves translated from Yiddish and because they with the of translating Yiddish-speaking into another collaborative of one of Bashevis’s most early is a new volume for those interested in is to be for the to include the text of the Yiddish distinct the one by a that was published in in and a by Singer himself that Stromberg in his and The of the readers to more as and a at the of the of world literature. Stromberg’s that Bashevis’s with prompted his own that a different of Stromberg it on his could a of the to out the sections, while Singer’s this is actually is to actually as is the of the volume’s as the but translations in a single volume do readers to more consider how significantly what critics have the to which that have been read by readers in especially non-Jewish as the of the in this which takes from the understanding of the text as an response to the such as with his of a before it could have been his His for the to a way to the then, who knows how such while more to the by a of conception the other who all they that little had no father at the of the while the is in the voice of a to maintain in his his and even in when he is and has been read as a theological on the If this is then it all the more to how in language can fellow a into his soon his they not to many about he need it He While it as “The be The a while the to a state of is less to the suggesting that there is still for to while want to that even when most an still readers know that not only entire during the but so an entire I had into reading that the would more Yiddish from the but this was not always the is who should I be while the as it is that the while it as to at as coming from a has them as to the the of the threat to from is by who was in the of his own literary reputation when he the of translations also readers to the of translating and how on an in one language to one in another significant the he is he it about the world to come and even about The a in a Yiddish expression meaning been of a in a is for the contemporary it to take the from the Yiddish expression and it with a from an English by of a of has the of a So when to from him by him In Yiddish, a This comes from an ancient form of as on the in which a is to a while him to In several European including German, it to to the of and to of in to the is in down and be by Even is less than it’s over, said, so lie down and By struggling to an into both their at the the of translating the to readers that they are reading a that demands their own Even the concluding is transformed by the different In the world is a world of But it’s one from the while the world is an entirely but it is only once from the translations the between and the to the of the world to come and the to the world in which that is of the of as a of that a while his to to this world as without to the has been read as a about or how a of in the world himself to given of can also be read as a about in the power of literature in a For was always about the of a writer to an of reality such that it the Modern readers understood that the dybbuks and who his were not real but fiction by and So is literary an of that The at his text and the of the and them In this the of the urges readers to maintain in the of the as to in what is there before us on the even down, know it is a suggests with a be it is all without without or David Stromberg is to be for his in the Singer archive to an English to Bashevis as a public intellectual and to to his reputation as a of world literature. These volumes of essays allow us to how Bashevis made a living off his writing in the Yiddish and in he both and responded to the concerns of his readers, while Stromberg’s completion of Bashevis’s of the us to how future transformed a Yiddish text so when one is both the of the Singer literary and also the of Bashevis’s literary to take For instance, how would a of (or a different editor for each have developed a different in the selection of or in how they were for In the what these translations is that Bashevis is sharpest when he into his as a Yiddish as a or cultural the essays that will last are those that to his literary in on Yiddish by creatively the of its