TRUST THE TALE

Winning the Nobel Prize for literature is all to the good, but if a writer can’t find actual readers in each new generation, his works do not survive. When was the last time you read something by the 1977 Nobel laureate, Vicente Aleixandre?

The Yiddish storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Prize in 1978, and if the record of recent publication is any guide, he at least has continued to acquire new readers. Shadows on the Hudson — his fourth novel to appear in English translation since his death in 1991 — has just been issued, and recent months have seen as well both Janet Hadda’s new biography and Dvorah Telushkin’s extraordinary account of her years as Singer’s secretary and translator.

Given this splendid conjunction, it seems churlish to report that Shadows on the Hudson is not good. But the novel is at least instructive about Singer’s improbable transformation from someone known during the 1940s only to America’s steadily shrinking audience of Yiddish speakers to a fixture during the 1970s in the New Yorker, a writer whose stories and novels were regularly translated into English and then into most of the world’s other major languages, and whose international success in turn helped spur a modest Yiddish renaissance.

Singer routinely published his novels first in serial form, and Shadows on the Hudson originally appeared in the Yiddish version of a New York City newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, between January 1957 and January 1958. Set largely in New York immediately after World War II, the central story involves a comically doomed adultery between a former mathematics prodigy, Hertz Dovid Grein, and a woman named Anna. As the many characters’ lives diverge and intersect, Anna remains the link: daughter of the real- estate developer Boris Makaver, who seeks to return to the harsh religious life of his childhood; wife of the unappetizing brooder Stanislaw Luria, who is seeking self-destruction; and former wife of a rogue, Yasha Kotik, who eluded the Nazis in Europe to reappear suddenly in Anna’s Americanized life.

The conflicts that animate the book — and give it, despite its creaking machinery, a flickering of life — are the same obsessions that fueled Singer throughout his career. In Shadows on the Hudson they are most clearly embodied in the character of Grein, the former prodigy now in his mid-forties and, after some hard immigrant years, enjoying considerable financial success in America as a mutual-fund manager. Like most of Singer’s protagonists Yasha in The Magician of Lublin, Herman Broder in Enemies, Aaron Greidinger in Shosha — Grein shuttles among several women. And like most other Singer heroes, Grein is a divided soul.

In this he closely resembles his creator. Singer was always something of a divided man. Born in 1904, he grew up in the strangely mixed world of Polish Jews before World War II: almost medieval shtetls in rural villages matched with thriving modern ghettos in the cities. He published his first stories in the Yiddish press in Poland. In 1935, he followed his brother, the novelist I. J. Singer, to America, escaping the Nazi slaughter that would obliterate Eastern European Judaism and haunt his fiction — even his happiest tales of pre-war Jewish life rendered poignant by knowledge of the looming Holocaust.

His first American success came in 1950 with the simultaneous publication in English and Yiddish of The Family Moskat. Before his death, he would produce numerous plays and children’s books, nine volumes of short stories, and twelve more novels. His best-known works include “Gimpel the Fool,” ” Yentl,” The Magician of Lublin, and Enemies: A Love Story.

Much to the discomfort of his secular interpreters, Singer did in fact continue to believe in God during his life in America. But his philandering revealed him to be a man who had little patience for the ethical teachings of his pious parents — just as his occasional public musings on God revealed his lack of patience with their theological teachings. Though his father (whose memory Singer lovingly preserved) devoted his life to the study of Torah, Singer denied God’s presence in Scripture: “All my probings led to the same conclusion — that there was some scheme within Creation, someone we call God, but He had not revealed Himself to anyone nor was there even the slightest indication that He desired love, peace, and justice.”

In Shadows on the Hudson, Grein and all the principal characters are under the shadow of the Holocaust. To Grein it seems that in America he and his fellow Jews are living in the underworld, like spirits of the dead. The typical Singer mix of an atheist lecturing God on His non-existence — “an unbeliever” compelled “to raise his eyes to heaven and appeal to the God whose existence he denied” — Grein ends by going to Israel and living the life of an Orthodox Jew. “What difference does it make who gave us the Torah?” he writes to a friend in America (in a creaky and over-explanatory letter with which Singer ends the book). “The Torah is the only effective teaching we have about how to bridle the human beast.”

The 1950s Shadows on the Hudson appears in English translation only now, probably in part because the author realized that it was not one of his strongest books. As he became increasingly adept in English and increasingly active in the translation of his works during the 1960s, Singer reinvented himself as a novelist, shifting to a tighter narrative style with a clear focus on a single central character. Janet Hadda’s Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life is far from the definitive biography we need, and the dead hand of psychoanalysis lies heavy on it. But it is the best overview of the writer’s life we currently have, and she is certainly right that Singer was shrewd in creating an image for himself among English readers.

Only after he was fully established as the chronicler of life in the shtetl — “the world and life of Eastern European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition,” as the Nobel Prize committee put it — did Singer oversee the translation into English of novels such as Enemies that explicitly acknowledged the Holocaust and offered harsh judgments on assimilated Jews in the United States.

By the time Singer was determined to see all of his novels translated into English, including potboilers such as Scum (serialized in Yiddish in the early 1970s and published in English shortly after his death), he was in decline, probably suffering from Alzheimer’s, the effects of which his secretary Dvorah Telushkin recounts with tact but with harrowing power. (Her memoir of the writer, Master of Dreams, is a moving book: the most fully realized portrait of a writer since Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs of her husband, Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet murdered by Stalin in the 1930s.)

In the early stages of his decline, Singer frequently and capriciously changed his mind about projects, and there was a sad comedy to his tantrums: ” May 30, 1986,” Telushkin records, “Isaac came into my house and dropped his entire manuscript of Shadows on the Hudson, which had been published in Yiddish in the 1950s, on the table, and yelled out, ‘I cancel this whole project! Do you hear? I don’t vant to owe translators any money. They vill all sue me. This is their real aim. To sue.'” Singer’s paranoia was the product of his illness, but long before that he had been guilty of understating the contributions made by his translators and editors, as if he were fearful that by giving them due credit, he would be somehow diminished.

Those fears were not entirely unfounded, as the malicious portrait of Singer in Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy, or, Yiddish in America” makes clear. In that story, first published in Commentary in November 1969, one of the translators of a Singeresque figure named “Ostrover” declares the man to be indifferent to the quality of his works in Yiddish; what matters to him is ” what will it turn into when it becomes English? Transformation is all he cares for — and in English he’s a cripple.”

Unaccountably, Hadda does not refer to this notorious story in her biography. Although in the acknowledgments she thanks “Cynthia Ozick, who answered my candid questions,” she touches on the issue of Singer and his translators only in passing. It is rather Telushkin’s intimate and persuasive memoir that gives the best account we are likely to get of Singer’s working methods — showing both Singer’s individual genius and the collaboration of his translators and editors. (She shows in particular the way Rachel MacKenzie, Singer’s editor at the New Yorker, performed radical surgery on the opening of Shosha and made the novel one of Singer’s best.)

One thing is certain: Were Singer in his prime and collaborating with the translator and editors, we would be spared such dialogue in Shadows on the Hudson as “If you’re so attached to that middle-aged hag, why are you giving me the runaround? How much longer do you think I’m going to tolerate you and your false promises? How long do you propose to go on playing this disgusting farce with me?”

And yet, such poorly rendered dialogue does in fact capture something present in the book, regardless of its translation. Shadows on the Hudson’s large canvas and big cast of characters bring to mind such earlier works from Singer as The Family Moskat and The Manor. But it unfortunately overlays the typical Singer story with something else — signaled by characters, all-too-obviously designed to represent a spectrum of worldviews, mingling in tedious set-pieces and exchanging lengthy philosophical orations utterly lacking in verisimilitude.

This is proof, in its way, of just how large loomed the example of Thomas Mann for an entire generation of writers, but it is also proof of just how good the German novelist was: Shadows on the Hudson recalls nothing so much as the innumerable, interminable, and rightly forgotten imitations of Mann that dominated 1950s European fiction. Singer’s hope of finding yet another generation of readers is better served by Janet Hadda’s biography — and virtually guaranteed by Dvorah Telushkin’s reminder in Master of Dreams that the author’s life itself was as fascinating as his best fiction.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.