“There is no such thing as Yiddish literature”: Metafictional Doubling in I. B. Singer’s “Vanvild Kava”

Abstract Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Vanvild Kava” demonstrates the widely discussed aspects of Singer’s twofold nature, as an author who remained submerged in the culture of Eastern European Jewry while residing in America and becoming world-renowned precisely because of his bilingual corpus. It is also a telling example of Singer’s double use of genre—the autobiographical and the fictional. This article follows the transformation of the story “Vanvild Kava,” originally published as memoir, arguing that Singer’s fictionalization of the text warrants an exploration of metafictional elements in his work, thus providing a heuristic lens through which the significance of self-reflection and self-reference in Singer’s work could be better understood. Reading “Vanvild Kava” as metafiction sheds light on Singer’s depictions of his own literary craft, and identifies two main metafictional qualities in his work: (1) the dramatization of the literary critic, particularly as a means of self-canonization within the literary tradition in which he has emerged and which he ultimately wished to transcend; and (2) the metafictional parody of a literary “dead end,” which, paradoxically, affirms his literary vitality.