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Isaac Bashevis Singer's Books for Young People

1976; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0702

1543-3374

Thomas P. Riggio,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

Isaac Bashevis Singer's Books for Young People Thomas P. Riggio (bio) Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translated by the author and Elizabeth Shub. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. $4.50. When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translated by the author and Elizabeth Shub. Pictures by Margot Zemach. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. $4.95. A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up In Warsaw, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Photographs by Roman Vishniac. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969. $4.50. Why Noah Chose the Dove, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translated by Elizabeth Shub. Pictures by Eric Carle. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974. $5.95. The Wicked City, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translated by the author and Elizabeth Shub. Pictures by Leonard Everett Fisher. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972. $4.50. "Who among our readers remembers such things?" lamented an editor at the Jewish Daily Forward when Isaac Singer began submitting stories about devils and ghosts. Forty years later Singer appears as much an anomaly. The phenomenon of children's literature translated from the Yiddish, grounded in the world of the shtetl, or East European Jewish village, and saturated with the arcana of Polish folklore suggests a formidable barrier even for the children of orthodox Jewish parents, not to mention the goyim among us. One anticipates the sort of cultural fence-straddling that Leonard R. Mendelsohn pointed out as the major pitfall for the writer of Jewish children's literature.1 Singer's stories surmount the problem of the incompatibility of traditional Jewish materials and vernacular literatures, simply, by ignoring it. America—the twentieth century—might not have been discovered; no concessions are made to a pluralistic audience. The stories demand attention for what they are, good yarns, however populated by shlemiels and broken-down rabbis, devils and dybbuks, Hannukkah and Passover vigils, dreidel games, or cheder days. The vocabulary and customs of the shtetl make exotic what in more modern dress would appear commonplace. Only a splinter of knowledge is necessary to make these collections accessible to most [End Page 304] children over the age of four. A certain degree of culture shock is, of course, unavoidable. Not only is "sin" taken for granted, but some explanation will be due the youngster who first reads a story in which a grandmother-narrator begins, "A father had four sons and four daughters." The shtetl was a patriarchal world, and on the surface Singer offers little resistance to its conventions. Yet as anyone who recalls "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" knows, Singer is not untouched by the many tragic dilemmas women face in such societies. Even in these stories the women of the shtetl most often emerge as the only sound guides to social order in a world ruled by male folly and incompetence. Behind such portraits lies the figure of the author's strong-willed mother as she appears in his memoirs, A Day of Pleasure. Most young people will have little trouble dealing with the tales' pre-rational ambiance, which is Singer's heritage from his early study of the Cabbala, his father's Hasidism, and the materials of a native Yiddish folklore. True, these elements are "secularized" as Singer passes biblical stories and folklore through the alembic of his erratic sensibility. Like Singer's other fiction, these tales attract readers who shy away from dogmatic theology and yet maintain a need for a morality grounded on theological uncertainties. Here Singer translates this need into the child's world: the stories provide an elusive spectacle of primary values—good and evil—battling within the matrix of an imaginary world that is meaningful without being exclusive. Faith, in its aspect as a container of moral and cultural valuation, is a steady theme. A young boy can outwit the devil, and thereby rescue his parents, because he kept the Hannukkah candle lit; the fate of Lot and his family is sealed when they turn their backs on sacred traditions to enter "the wicked city"; a rabbi's magic is more potent than a witch's after he...