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I B Singer, illusion, and the True World

About a half-century ago, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, one August late afternoon, was sitting in a cafe near Times Square. It was not yet that hour at which the waiter would ask the aging tea drinkers to please make room; i.e., get out; and don’t schvitz on the tablecloths. This Isaac (well, it might have been he) was approached by a man whose name he does not remember. That is odd.

Who could forget the name Zelig Fingerbein? It sounds like it belongs to a Borscht Belt waiter doubling as a “Simon Says” caller-leader. The mixed-up name is weirdly relevant to the end of the story, when Zelig and I. B. are looking at a gigantic billboard advertising a movie: “A half-naked woman, four stories high, lit up by spotlights.” As Zelig stared, “half his face was green, the other red—like a modern painting. . . . one eye laughing and one tearing.” Isaac remarks, “If there is no God, she is our god.” Zelig had a modern, 42nd Street answer. “What she is promising, she can deliver.”

The Talmud warns not to cast one’s lot “with those who frequent the theaters and circuses . . . they labor for the pit of destruction.” Who knew? The Deuce is fetid with humidity; the raw noise and “stench com[es] up from the subway gratings.” There is a mixed multitude. “The neon signs . . . announce in fiery language the bliss to be brought by Pepsi Cola, Camel cigarettes, Wrigley’s chewing gum.”

Before leaving the café, Zelig tells I.B. his story, which includes the fact that he now lives with his wife and his wife’s lover, one Max. Zelig and Genia were happily married, and comfortable in America (from Poland they were) . But when he began to sleep around, she took a lover too. It was a kind of game they played. Attractive Genia started to think, once they moved up from the Lower East Side and got a TV, that she could be like Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, or some of I.B.’s characters (home truth). The couple even made a list of candidates. That resulted in Max, a seller of antiques (fake), a painter who copies the Old Masters, and a closet homosexual. Genia said she would break off with him, but could not. Zelig concludes, “A home, like everything else, is an illusion.” That includes all the pleasant I B Singer stories, Tolstoy and Flaubert novels, , movies, museums, concerts, dances, and bright lights that are all the sweeter if enjoyed together, or in Zelig and Genia’s case, with the “third one.” The phrase "a Coney Island of the mind" seems to fit.

Flaubert, Tolstoy, neon, and Max? That seems to mix up beautifully round apples with ketchup-and-hot water soup at the automat. But it’s all “theaters and circuses” as Zelig sees it. This brings us around to Sam Roth, a showman who was a self-appointed theater critic, and who believed himself to be carrying on in the show-biz entrepreneurship of The Great Ziegfeld. Sam was at least a little like Max, Zelig, and Genia in his sexual hungers, his love of theaters and circuses, and the profit he could get from other people’s attachment to them, especially the prurient attachment. Roth also studied Jewish lore and may have been familiar with a passage in the Babylonian Talmud that the now-disillusioned Zelig redacts: “One sin drags another after it; one step off the accepted path and all taboos are broken.” It did not stop him from making his fortune by selling erotica, including explicit modernist classics. Despite being quite mixed up himself by his pursuit of the American Dream, he would have found that in saying the following, Zelig had said a mouthful: “Nowadays Satan doesn’t need to strain his voice to tempt us. The nine muses do his work for him.” All credit to I B Singer for taking that seriously.

One aspect of Roth’s sense of reality/illusion came from Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895). Nordau thought modern humanity was becoming increasingly self-obsessive, addicted to sexual titillation, reliant on escapist entertainments, and tolerant of homosexuality and sadomasochism. He diagnosed an emotional overstimulation, a neurasthenia, which he thought scientific study of mind and body could remedy before the degeneration had progressed to a pandemic. Nordau found illustration for his claims in modernist authors like Nietzsche, Zola, and Ibsen, who, he said, had betrayed their culture and national ideals, destroying altruism and spirituality. He especially despised Baudelaire, the perfect example of the walker in the city, enjoying the wise guys, the outcasts, the painted women, the fashions, and all the splenetic moods.

One explanation for this attitude is that-- according to Nordau, Zionist and "muscle Jew" fighting to bring his people back to Jerusalem and God-- those poetic and philosophical works created by modernist philosophers and novelists "with a hammer" were ugly threats. They were entertainments that were also spiritually satisfying replacements for atonement with an angry or plaintively suffering God, and as such were as at least as dangerous as the various low-rent sex-and-violence shows available to Zelig, Max, and Genia in Broadway neon.

Zelig, aware from his own experience of the distractions and illusions of the modern city, and the fixation upon “as much pleasure as possible before disappearing forever,” would have agreed. I.B., whose stories had been so closely analyzed by Genia and Zelig that they knew them better than he did himself, makes the comment about the 4-story high naked woman as being “our god.” He has no reply to Zelig’s corrosive follow up about the half-undressed female being able to deliver what she promises.

It is Singer's genius that the tone of his story is funny, tolerant, corrosive, and full of human pep and persistence, all at the same time. The humanity is all the richer for the stench, over-stimulating images, and illusion, the Coney Island of the mind-- at the core of the modern experience. Nu? It's a one-eye-red and one-eye-green modernist picture.
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I can’t end this without saying that Jewish asceticism, even if it allows the pious to be with God every day, is not an option for you, me, and 99% of those reading this blog (assuming anyone does). There may have been study houses in old Poland which were the only buildings inhabited in ruined, abandoned sthetls after WWI. As the wind freshened, the shadows dissolved in the dusk, and the snow flew, the only other sounds were Elijah's footsteps. Agnon’s “Tale of a Scribe” ends with the scribe, finished a scroll, dancing with The Divine Presence and his deceased wife in what the Hasidics term the Real World. In Singer’s “A Wedding in Brownsville,” a physician, arriving at a wedding party, finds his boyhood fiance, whom he thought murdered by the Nazis s0me 40 years ago. And she had been. On the way to the Brownsville that very night, had been killed too, in an auto accident on his way to the wedding. She had been waiting for him in the Real World.

These are miracle stories. We don’t live there, nor can we visit in our daydreams, like Sam Roth did, to find women to whom he would like to apologize, or claim as a “prison wife.” Our life is “and"; furthermore, we don't get to imagine, as Sam did, that while serving the here-and-now, we are really preparing for the Real one. Philip Roth said "life is and," and in his works he proved it: dazzling, humiliating, brutally sensual and constricting, although maybe “Something Is There,” which is the title of another Singer yarn.
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