In the XNUMXs, if you were serious, you had to read at least a novel Rob Isak Baševis Singer, who launched BIGZ on the market in 1979. It would have been desirable if you had read some of his stories. Why? This writer of Jewish origin was born and raised in the part of Poland that then belonged to Imperial Russia, and from 1935 until his death he lived in America. To the complete surprise of the publisher and the audience, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. A man who stubbornly wrote in Yiddish, and whose first work was translated into English in 1953 by Sol Bellow, the American Nobel laureate in literature, became a world literary star at the age of seventy-six.
Yiddish, my language
No writer in the 20th century embraced his own language with such love and despair. Singer's character from the novel Rob, Jakov, is set in the Polish 17th century. When he wakes up in the hut, Jacob wishes his cow good morning: "Over the years, he got used to talking to the cows, and even to himself, just so he wouldn't forget Yiddish." Talking to cows so as not to forget the language? Isn't that Sisyphean effort of speaking in a language that few hear and understand actually a metaphor for Singer's life?
He wrote in a language that some considered a dialect of Middle German, others a separate language, but unable to find a wider readership. Nevertheless, Yiddish is the language of a people "whom God chose for suffering, showering them with all the torments described in the Book of Punishments", as Singer states elsewhere in the novel Rob.
"It is my language. It is in that language that I will win or lose," said Singer in one conversation, answering for the umpteenth time when asked why he writes in Yiddish.
The Germanic formula of the Ashkenazi world
Yiddish is the Germanic language of the Ashkenazi Jews who settled in the German-speaking area. It arose in Central Europe from High German in its middle stage of development between 1050 and 1350. Almost four-fifths of the vocabulary is undoubtedly of German origin. But ancient Aramaic, Hebrew and a number of expressions from Slavic and Romance languages are mixed into the language. Before World War I, nine out of ten Jews on the planet were Ashkenazi. Since Yiddish in its eastern variety was the mother tongue of most of these people, it can be said that it was the language of at least ten million speakers. Even in the first years of the Soviet Union, Yiddish was supported as the language of the Jewish poor, in contrast to Hebrew, which the Soviets declared to be the language of the class enemy. But under Stalin, who returned to the classic anti-Semitic premise, that support was rescinded.
It is estimated that the number of Yiddish speakers today has dropped to half a million, somewhat more optimistic are the estimates that speak of a maximum of one and a half million people who speak the language. The dominance of Hebrew as the official language of Israel contributed to this, as well as the immersion of Jews in other language communities.
"People often ask me why I write in Yiddish, a language that can be considered dead. I will try to explain it in a few words. I like to write ghost stories, and nothing befits ghosts better than a dead tongue...", said Singer with his characteristic humor. At the awarding of the Nobel Prize in December 1978, he devoted a good part of his speech to the importance of Yiddish for artistic creation: "For me, Yiddish as a language and the behavior of those who speak it are identical. In Yiddish as a language and spirit there are expressions of pious joy, desire for life, longing for the messiah, patience and deep respect for human individuality. There is in Yiddish calm humor and gratitude for every day of life, for every bit of success, for every encounter with love”.
Icek Zinger from Imperial Russia
Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin, in today's Polish Masovian Voivodeship - then Imperial Russia. He was misled under the name Icek Hersz Zynger. He later claimed that he was born in 1904. His father belonged to the seventh generation of Hasidic rabbis. Allegedly, the first of these rabbis was a student of the founder of Hasidism, the Bal Shem Tov. The mother, also a rabbi's daughter, was called Bathsheba (Bathsheba) - after the wife of the biblical king David and Solomon's mother. Although they were not poor, the father rejected all luxuries.
Singer would later say about growing up in such a home: "In our house and in many other houses, the eternal questions were more current than the latest news from the Yiddish newspaper."
After several relocations, the family settled in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw. At that time, the largest Jewish community in the world lived there. In 1910, out of 760.000 inhabitants of Warsaw, 300.000 were Jews. The poverty that pressed the family during the First World War forced the father and mother to separate. Mother moved to her birthplace with Isaac and his younger brother Moshe. After that, Isak returns to Warsaw again, to go to rabbinical school. After a year, he left school, but his older brother hired him as a proofreader in the magazine's editorial office . Already the second published story is signed by a pseudonym derived from his mother's name - Bathsheba's son becomes the writer Baševis.
He married in 1929 and had a son, Israel Zamir, and when he followed his brother to New York in 1935, he divorced his wife Runia. He would not see his son again until 1955 in Palestine.
American decades
He publishes his Yiddish prose and poetry in a New York magazine Forverts (Forward). He met Alma Wasserman, who escaped from Munich before the Nazis, in New York in 1938. They got married in 1940, and three years later Isak Bashevis Singer became an American citizen. He was inspired by Knut Hamsun and Thomas Mann, whom he translated into Yiddish.
Sol Bellow, an American writer of Jewish origin, and later winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, translated his short story in 1953. Gimpel Crazy in English. Since then, in the United States, his story-telling fame has grown with each translation into English. Later, he personally participated in the editing of the English translation, he refined the English text to the extent that he himself spoke of the "second original". His stories and novels have been translated into Serbian: "The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories", "The Magician from Lublin", "Satan in Goraj", "Madman", "Enemies", "The Slave", "Shadows on the Hudson" as well as an autobiographical work "In my father's courtroom".
The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Isak Baševis Singer in 1978 "for his impressive storytelling art, which, rooted in the Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings to life universal human circumstances." Singer did not expect the Nobel Prize, but he saw in it "recognition of Yiddish - the language of exile, a language without a country and borders, which is not supported by any government, a language which has no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises and war tactics; a language that is equally despised by the ungodly and the emancipated Jews. It is true that what the great religions preached, was practiced day by day by people from the ghetto who spoke Yiddish. They were in the true meaning of those words - people of the Book".
Storytelling as deliverance
Storytelling for Singer was not an activity like any other. Storytelling is the production of meaning. In the story Narrator Naftali and his horse Sus Reb Zebulun said: "Today we live, but already tomorrow, today will be a story." The whole world, the whole human life, is just one long story". That is Singer's deepest motive. Untold life as if it does not exist.
But storytelling is more than that - a search for hope, and perhaps a way of salvation. Singer emphasized that in ancient Jewish literature there was no fundamental difference between poets and prophets: "Our old poetry often became a law and a way of life."
Here you can see how much Singer's work is based on the nearly destroyed world of his childhood - a world of Hasidic mysticism that reminds us that reality often cannot be changed, but the eyes that watch it can.
Singer was never dogmatic, in his work there is a whole series of characters who argue with God. In one place in Edge says: "Legal regulations and rites multiplied, but the narrow-mindedness of the people did not decrease; the leaders ruled tyrannically; hatred, malice and rivalry have not disappeared". U Wedding guests we also come across this thought: "I thought I was praying to God; but I remembered what Spinoza wrote: God is emotionless; He knows nothing of pity and works according to eternal laws. It is as reasonable to pray to him as to a volcano, a waterfall or a rock”. Singer, however, could not accept materialism - the blind evolution of cosmic matter - as the ultimate answer.
The poet as a savior
Although he was skeptical, sometimes pessimistic, he preserved hope for man and humanity in his faith in poetry, which for him is certainly a type of godliness:
"No matter how strange these words sound, I am often haunted by the thought that if all social theories experience a breakdown, if wars and revolutions plunge humanity into complete darkness, that the poet - whom Plato banished from his Republic - could rise up, that we all delivered”.
Isak Baševis Singer died three decades ago, on July 24, in Florida. He is the only one who, writing in Yiddish - once the main language of the European Ashkenazis - achieved global fame. Let's remind you, the names without which our present-day culture would be unimaginable come from the Ashkenazi milieu - Albert Einstein, Gustav Mahler, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Marc Chagall, Noam Chomsky.
Singer erected a magnificent literary monument to that Ashkenazi world, and to ordinary people caught between epochal wars and pogroms.
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