Love and Death
So many I.B. Singer novels
have been posthumously published in the last few years ( Scum , The
Certificate , Meshugah ) that death is coming to seem like just
another problem of translation for the great Yiddish writer. But Singer, who
died in 1991, wrote so much and so well in his long career that it would be
wrong to conclude that his publishers are cynically raking their way through a
justly neglected backlog. Shadows on the Hudson , published in English
for the first time in 1997, was written in the 1950s, when Singer was at the
height of his literary powers. He had emigrated to the United States from
Poland some 20 years before, and though his translated work was already
acquiring a following, he was a long way from becoming the puckish purveyor of
Old World culture who charmed the American public and won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1978. He still inhabited his own liminal realm--a Yiddish writer
living in America, an American writer creating fiction in Yiddish. Shadows
on the Hudson , produced inside the intimacy of the Jewish language and
serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward , has an unself-conscious energy
and honesty that gives it, even after 40 years, a shocking power.
Set in
New York's Upper West Side in 1947, the novel follows the lives of a group of
refugees linked by blood, friendship, sexual intrigue, and Old World ties. Many
are from Poland, but assimilation and war have blown them through Germany,
Russia, Cuba, and Paris until they fetch up, in various states of spiritual and
physical exhaustion, in Manhattan. They gather in the spacious Central Park
West apartment of Boris Makaver, who has rebuilt the wealth he lost in the war
and reclaimed the religious piety that his associates have mostly
abandoned.
These are men and women who have lost homes, hopes, wives,
husbands, children, illusions. They sit and argue, between mouthfuls of
strudel, about communism, God, the destruction of Judaism, the horrors of
American culture. "I know one thing, Shloymele," Makaver says to one of his
friends, a German-educated physician. "Our fathers were Jews, we've become
half-Jews, and our children are ... well, I'd better not say anything." The
refugees are also half in love with death. Stanislaw Luria, who lost his entire
family in the Holocaust, speaks incessantly of torture and the dead, until
Anna, his second wife, cries out: "You're starting with the horrors again! Why
should anyone want to come up to our apartment when you speak about such
things." Dr. Shrage, a mathematician whose wife died in the Warsaw Ghetto,
devotes himself to psychic research, desperate to contact her.
But if
these wounded souls are in some sense ghosts themselves, as we are meant to
think, they are nevertheless carnal ghosts. The plot is set in motion when
Anna, daughter of the pious Makaver, decides to run off with Hertz Grein. Both
are married--Anna to the morose Luria and Grein to the long-suffering Leah,
with whom he has two grown children whom he regards with a kind of detached
disgust. Having raised his family without the religious principles he long ago
rejected, Grein finds himself horrified by their alien, American otherness.
Grein's hypocritical disdain for his own family
is the natural state of Singer's characters, shaped as they are by multiple
cultures--Eastern European Jewish piety, radical secularism, American
self-invention. It is in part to drown out these competing impulses and to
squelch despair that his lovers fling themselves into each other's arms. Grein
is the central consciousness of the book, a man who, once a brilliant Talmud
scholar in Poland and then a student of secular philosophy, is now a
half-hearted mutual-fund manager in America. His head is filled with biblical
and liturgical ruminations, Nietzschean doubt, American optimism, and a loud
wail of self-diverting lust--all of which is expressed internally in a jumble
of Yiddish and Polish and English and Hebrew. Singer is very good at evoking
the palimpsest imprints of his characters' layered lives in a way that gives
them more modernist complexity than his rather conventional conception of
character and plot might otherwise have allowed for.
He is
also good at making their highly personal adventures seem the outgrowth of
historical and metaphysical circumstances. Singer's decision to set his novel
in 1947 allows the book to spin on a historical axis--the aftermath of the
Holocaust, the creation of the state of Israel, the birth of the Cold War. The
Holocaust, for instance, does not simply inspire the characters' large,
despairing gestures; it filters into their casual foreplay: "Do you remember
how we once turned on the gas and sat in the bathtub together?" Esther, another
of Grein's lovers, reminds him breathlessly.
One of the bracing elements in the novel is the casual
darkness with which his characters discuss the world. Mickey Sabbath, the
irreverent, renegade hero of Philip Roth's apocalyptic Sabbath's
Theater , would hardly raise an eyebrow here. "Why should it matter to me if
they massacre types like these or burn them in ovens?" Grein thinks,
disgustedly contemplating the coarse Florida Jews who have snubbed him and his
new lover, Anna. "The tragedy is that they destroyed the good ones and left
this trash behind." Asked what became of her first husband, a profligate actor,
Anna remarks matter-of-factly: "It was thought he was murdered by the Nazis but
what's the saying? Scum floats to the top." The actor, when he does
miraculously turn up to embark on a successful Broadway career, admits he
destroyed his first wife's happiness as if it were the most natural thing in
the world: "Well, the daughter of a Hasidic family, the child of a wealthy man,
came on the scene and I ruined her. In those days, I wanted to ruin everything.
It was a sort of an ambition with me." This is a man who, seeing a full moon
rise beautifully in the sky, feels moved to announce, "Oh, if only I could piss
all over it!" That God himself might be a Nazi is a thought that several
characters comfortably entertain.
It would be wrong to see in
all this merely the warping effects of the Holocaust; Singer is chronicling
something larger and more complicated than that. Most of his characters,
despite Orthodox childhoods, began their rebellion against God before World War
II, in the '20s and '30s when Jews were stepping out of shtetl culture
for the first time in a thousand years. This was true of Singer himself, who
has a good deal in common with his hero, Grein. The Holocaust merely added a
horrible twist to their rebellion. Ernest Jones, Freud's English biographer,
famously observed that Hamlet, wishing his father dead, was unable to survive
his father's actual murder because he was so crippled by guilt. In other words,
the prince's real tragedy was that somebody fulfilled his fantasy for him. One
might say something similar about Singer's characters. Having rebelled in their
youth against Judaism's commandments, having come to revile its
restrictions--having, in some sense, wished it dead--they were forced to watch
the Nazis fulfill their fantasy by actually murdering the thing whose
destruction they inwardly willed. No wonder so many of them feel implicated in
evil.
This peculiar double death
adds anguish and guilty energy to the book. Grein has the fundamentalism of the
fallen Orthodox: He sees only the faith of his father or a full embrace of sin.
He cannot believe in a middle way. Ultimately, he becomes a penitent, fleeing
his sexual entanglements, his family, his responsibilities, and taking up
refuge in Palestine. This stab at return is both unconvincing and at the same
time what makes Singer and this novel so interesting. For what Grein comes to
resemble, in his selfish flight from the past, from responsibility, from moral
choices, is nothing so much as a Yiddish Huckleberry Finn. He isn't going back
to Palestine, he's lighting out for new territory. He has become an American at
last.
