The Atheist Who Hears God's Voice By ALFRED KAZIN
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A CROWN OF FEATHERS
And Other Stories By Isaac Bashevis Singer.
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East European Jews have produced many stories, narratives, legends, but until our day, very little fiction. In Jerusalem last summer, at a symposium on ''the sources of Jewish creativity'' to which Isaac Bashevis Singer was probably not invited (he embodies so many ''sources of Jewish creatively'' all by himself), the orthodox Chaim Potok admitted that ''It is not possible for an orthodox Jew who was committed to esthetics to be honest to both traditions.''
This should be obvious, but isn't to a great many Jews who still read novels but can't understand why, since he is the one Jewish novelist who can write about the unchanging Jewish struggles through the ages, Isaac Bashevis Singer is just as interested in truth as he was when a young Chassid in gabardine and earlocks timidly looking at the street life in Warsaw.
The historic problem for Isaac Singer--as witness those other children of devout families, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane--is that whereas the orthodox believe that truth is personified by God and God is the truth, the Jewish novelist who derives from orthodoxy may find truth always protean and amazing because this is the way God actually thinks and moves. God may even be a novelist ceaselessly creating characters who, as Melville said to Hawthorne, must astonish Him as much as He astonishes us.
Isaac Bashevis Singer is an extraordinary writer. And this new collection of stories, like so much that he writes, represents the most delicate imaginative splendor, wit, mischief and, not least, the now unbelievable life that Jews once lived in Poland. But Singer is also a rarity among Jewish novelists. Though necessarily secularized, he still has access to the mystical Jewish theology in which he was brought up by the rabbis on rabbis who were his father, grandfathers, uncles. So the world to Isaac Bashevis Singer still represents the mind of God. Pious folks are obsessed with obeying the will of God. But God, the inexpressible Other, the unfathomable Father who dominates pious lives, is to Singer an endlessly surprising thinker whose uncountable variables of creation are so many that Singer has an amused understanding of classical paganism, made up of irreconcilable spirits who were nevertheless behind every bush. And who rather crowded the world with their busy divinity. But who else would say in his own voice about Israel: ''In the paper before me I read about thefts, car accidents, border shootings. One page was full of obituaries. No, the Messiah hadn't come yet. The Resurrection was not in sight. Orthopedic shoes were displayed in a shop across the way'' and in the same story, ''The Captive,'' have a painter say about Israel: ''Once I had a philosophy about indifference. But here one cannot be indifferent. At night, when the moon is shining and I walk through the narrow alleys, I am enraptured. If I moved to another country I would die from yearning. I stroll along the sea and literally hear the words of the prophets. It's in my imagination. I know, but I'm surrounded by the old Israelites and even the Canaanites and the other nations that preceded Joshua, the son of Nun. I've lived in both Algeria and Morocco. The ghosts there are wild apaches, murderers, maniacs. This land teems with saints and heroes. Although I do not believe in God, I hear His voice. An atavism has taken hold of us Jews and it is even stronger than the instinct for life. Don't you feel it?''
There are 24 stories in this collection. The (mostly) Jewish characters who pass through them (not forgetting the thin unsaintly vegetarian who wrote them) do just that--they always just pass through. They are part of a mysterious creation that is the larger, more interesting part of themselves. Their notable temporariness in this world may express their flight through the mind of God. But this ''passing through'' is also a tribute to the larger body of believers, God's people living and dead, whom a Jew calls upon when he prays and who help make up the deeper existence of the individual Jew. But since Singer is the most unsentimental observer of his fellow Jews, this ''passing through'' is also seen as a desperate mutability. It is what his Polish Jews have built into themselves as result of so much hatred in their hearts. They believe the world to be unreal.
Singer's characters are vivid, vociferous, but they are not all together important to themselves any longer. Perhaps that is why there are so many of them. Yet the are not mere victims either, they suffer from their own capriciousness (always a cardinal point with Singer), for they mean to do right, out of habit, but suddenly find their duty in this world indecipherable. And that is something they have against the world, which in their pious youth felt easier to the touch.
In the title story, a beautiful and gifted young orphan, Akhsa, brought up by her wealthy, pious and indulgent grandfather, hears the voice of her dead grandmother scorning the harshly pious suitor her grandfather has picked out for her. Akhsa refuses him, the grandfather is disgraced and dies. Akhsa, alone in the world, now hears her grandmother telling her that Christ is the son of God and to look inside her pillow for the sign. It is a crown of feathers, topped by a cross. Akhsa is so impressed by this communication from the spiritual world that she becomes a Catholic, marries a Polish squire. Eventually she discovers that her ''grandmother'' is being impersonated by the devil. In the last and most remarkable section of this story, she returns to the Jewish community, searches out and marries her old suitor, a religious fanatic who has never forgiven her and who forces her to undergo a series of wild penances that finally kill her. Before her death she still longs for a sign, ''the pure truth revealed.'' But though she guesses that there is another crown of feathers in her pillow and this one bears the four Hebrew letters that stand for the unsayable name of God, Akhsa dies without the assurance that this crown is more a revelation of the truth than the other. The townspeople who find bits of down between the dead woman's fingers can never figure out what she has been searching for, and ''no matter how much the townspeople wondered and how many explanations they tried to find, they never discovered the truth.''
For some reason Singer thought it necessary to add to this story the reflection that ''if there is such a thing as truth it is as intricate and hidden as a crown of feathers.'' This is so much his faith as a novelist, and his practice, that I can only suppose that he wanted to admonish the Yiddish readers of the Jewish Daily Forward, where Singer's stories first appear, and who are now accustomed to more unctuous accounts of Jewish life and belief than they get from Singer.
I do not mean that Singer is a shrew about Jewish life, like certain American Jewish writers who cannot get over mama and can displace her only by reproducing her legendary force of invective. Singer swims happily in the whole ancient and modern tradition of the Jews--Jews are his life. But he would certainly agree with Mark Twain's reply to anti-Semites: ''Jews are members of the human race, worse than that I cannot say of them.'' And he would also say, as Jews know better than anyone, that oppression is not good for people.
In these stories the Polish Jews emerge on a world scale, yet remain parts of a distinctive Jewish environment: Warsaw when it was under Russian rule (the first time), Coney Island, Paris, Tel Avi. They have been through Czarist pogroms, Nazi camps, Communist camps; their intimate family memories go back to the murdering, rampaging Cossacks of the 17th century who buried Jewish children alive. And here they are anywhere but in Poland, with the blue concentration camp numbers on their wrists, up to their lips in one mad love affair after another (Singer is among other things the most rueful and the funniest novelist of the erotic life in Yiddish literature), and above all, bemused by their own obsessions.
Singer describes old Kerenskyites in New York (some of them Russian aristocrats) hobbling around each other until one falls dead. ''Bulov took the corpse's wrist and felt for a pulse. He made a face, shook his square head from side to side, and his eyes were saying ''This is against all rules, Count. This is not the way to behave.' Skillfully, he closed the corpse's mouth.'' He describes a Warsaw mother, insanely vain, and her son, a self-destructive prodigy, who in their night clothes dance together in the middle of the night. They will die together in the Warsaw Ghetto. He describes a Yiddish writer so madly in love with a married woman that her enraged husband maliciously made her pregnant. Now ''her son'' regularly comes for handouts to the lover, who supports him in memory of his beloved--and out of guilt for ''causing'' her pregnancy. He describes a woman who unaccountably, maddeningly is always losing things, and finally gets permanently lost herself. She just disappears, like one of her possessions.
Demons, it seems. Demons are a big thing in Singer's fiction, though many of his ''first'' readers complain to him that demons are not to be believed in--a strange complaint indeed when you consider Jewish experience. But on this point the husband of the wife who was always losing things has the perfect comment, addressed to Singer himself, who appears in several of these stories in the most natural and anecdotal sort of way. Memoir here becomes story, and story somebody's memoir.
'''You often write about the mysterious powers. You believe in demons, imps--what have you... Even if demons do exist, they are not in New York. What would a demon do in New York? He would get run over by a car or tangle himself in a subway and never find his way out. Demons need a synagogue, a ritual bathhouse, a poorhouse, a garret with torn prayer books--all the paraphernalia that you describe in your stories. Still, hidden powers that no one can explain exist everywhere... I have had an experience with them. The Yiddish newspapers wrote about it, and the English ones too. But how long do they write about anything? Here in America, if the Heavens would part and the angel Gabriel were to fly down with his six fiery wings and take a walk on Broadway, they would not write about it for more than a day or two. If you are in a rush to go light candles and bless the incoming Sabbath, I will come back some other time,' he said smiling and winking.''
Alfred Kazin's most recent work is ''Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer.''
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/25/h ... thers.html 
