Zamir is right. New Jersey is no place for the Jewish dead. Yet that is where Bashevis lies, forever removed from the Poland of his dreams and the New York of his destiny. Neither Manhattan nor Warsaw, New Jersey offers little Jewish memory, and therefore no fitting memorial. Even Miami would have been a better resting place. Unlike Sholem Aleykhem, whose New York funeral was a massive outpouring of a hundred and fifty thousand, Bashevis died in loneliness and was buried with little ceremony. Even those few who came to see him buried were late for his death.

We were...

During the almost four centuries between 1602 and 1958, Yiddish literature produced four separate reworkings of the fear-filled folk myth that one day a Jewish apostate might come to rule the world as pope.¹ The recurrence of this fantasy is noteworthy, since its roots lie deep in the biblical story of Joseph, with its overtones of Jewish self-eradication through assimilation. From this biblical exemplum it branches out into the urgent messianic longings that inform Jewish writing through two thousand years of exile.

An informative starting point for exploring the dichotomy between the work of Bashevis and that of I. B....

It is doubtful whether any of the exclusive group of Yiddish readers who started readingDer sotn in goray(Satan in Goray) by Yitskhok Bashevis in the January 1933 issue of the Warsaw journalGlobusrealized that these were the opening chapters of what would prove to be one of the most remarkable works of modern Yiddish literature, one that departed significantly from contemporary literary norms. There was nothing stylistically remarkable in the first sentences, and the subject matter itself might have induced a sensation ofdéjà vuin the reader:

in shnas takh, in der tsayt, ven bogdan khmelnitski...

In this essay I will analyze a number of observations that I. B. Singer made in essays written from 1943 to 1978 on the sociolinguistic status of the Yiddish language; hence the intentionaltsveytaytshikeyt(ambiguity) of the title. In his role, especially after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, as arguably the most familiar speaker and writer of Yiddish to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, Bashevis’s thoughts on various aspects of the language are of interest, regardless of whether or not they were consonant with the views of other Yiddish-speaking intellectuals (often they were not).

I will begin by...

Walking about Jewish neighborhoods today, in almost any country in the West or anywhere in Israel, one sees many dogs of every breed and pedigree. This makes it difficult to realize that some of us in childhood heard parents and grandparents repeat the now wholly comic saying,oyb a yid hot a hunt, oder der yid iz nisht keyn yid oder der hunt iz nisht keyn hunt, “If a Jew has a dog, either the Jew is not a Jew or the dog is not a dog.” But to our Eastern European forebears, there was nothing funny about dogs.¹

In...

Bashevis’s novelDer bal-tshuve, originally published inForvertsin 1973 and translated into English asThe Penitentten years later,¹ is cast almost exclusively in the form of a monologue by a Polish Jew named Yoysef Shapiro who has escaped to the Soviet Union during the war and then become a prosperous real-estate developer in New York. Dissatisfied by the spiritual void of American life, disenchanted by the various leftist ideologies espoused by secular Jews, he has decided to return, as it were, to the most Orthodox version of the faith of his forebears.

His monologue follows the form of...

Yitskhok Bashevis’s first literary portrayal of his psychosexual development as a young Yiddish writer who had just left behind the traditional Hasidic world was his 1928 story “Oyfn oylem-hatoyhu” (In the World of Chaos).² In Bashevis’s 1981 spiritual autobiography,Love and Exile: An Autobiographical Trilogy, he referred to this story as a veiled self-portrait of the writer as a young man:

“In the World of Chaos” might have provided me my first direction as to style and genre. Somehow, I identified with this hero. Just like him, I lived yet was ashamed to live, ashamed to eat and ashamed to...

Obvious in a number of Bashevis’s stories featuring demons and ghosts, dybbuks and werewolves, is the writer’s extensive deployment of motifs common in traditional Jewish folklore. Moreover, his supernatural narrators repeatedly refer to old Yiddish storybooks and legends—thosemayse-bikhlekhinyiddish-taytsh, bought from itinerant book peddlers or found moldering in old attics—which underprop the tales these supernatural beings relate. This essay seeks to explore some of the similarities and, more significantly, some differences in folk motifs reworked in stories by Bashevis and to suggest reasons for what Bashevis is doing.

TheMayse-bukh, from which Bashevis drew his materials...

When Oyzer-Heszl (Heshl), the protagonist ofDi familye mushkat(The Family Moskat), first visits Hadassah in her room, he looks at her bookshelf and notices a number of Polish books, among others Adam Mickiewicz’sPan Tadeuszand Stanislaw Przybyszewski’sThe Outcry, as well as a thick novel entitledPharaoh.¹ The name of the author of this novel is not mentioned, presumably to indicate that Oyzer-Heszl and perhaps indirectly Bashevis as well are not familiar with this particular work. Oyzer-Heszl declares that he wants to read all these books, and indeed he does read some of them, as we learn later....

By the time Bashevis had been thrust into the forefront of world literature by winning the Nobel Prize in 1978, his works had been translated into a great many languages. The translations were so widespread, and enjoyed such extensive popularity, that at times readers may actually have forgotten the language in which the original work was written. Hence it is particularly necessary to emphasize that Bashevis’s chosen literary language was Yiddish, chiefly because error-ridden translations have led to awkward textual corruptions that detract from the quality of the writing and the integrity of the author.

Despite the profusion of works...

Recent Yiddish literary criticism has focused on the issue of how modern Yiddish literature has incorporated Jewish folklore, sometimes romanticizing it, at other times parodying it, and at still other times using it with a modernist sensibility.¹ It seems that as consensus for a canon of Yiddish fiction emerges, many of the established works’ entry into literary immortality is owing in large measure to their connection with Jewish life through folkloric material. Yitskhok Bashevis, considered one of the great fiction writers in Yiddish, has certainly exemplified the Yiddish author who successfully wrote “folklorically,” going beyond the genres of folklore to...

It was a mismatch made in heaven—Bashevis Singer and Abe Cahan. The many years Isaac Bashevis Singer spent in Cahan’s kingdom atForvertswere central to his professional development as a novelist and to his private experience as an immigrant. Had it not been for the twists of family history that brought Bashevis toForverts, he would have missed both his greatest opportunity and his deepest humiliation. What was it in Bashevis’s upbringing and sensibility that brought him into such an unhappy relationship with the formidable Abraham Cahan?

American Yiddish culture as it looks today would not exist without...

Among the many valuable papers housed in the Singer Yiddish archive in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin is a large section in holograph, and the first five chapters in print as they appeared inForverts, of a novel by Bashevis, remarkable in being entirely different in genre from any of the fiction that made him so celebrated in his lifetime.

This novel, entitledYarme un keyle(Yarme and Keyle), serialized inForvertsbetween January 1956 and January 1957, is set in the Jewish underworld of Warsaw in the years before World War...

Yarme had broken his vow. After Keyle had sobered up, she’d wept bitterly, kissed his feet, and sworn by her dead mother’s memory that if he didn’t forgive her, she’d go straight to the Kalisz railroad line and throw herself down on the tracks. She tore her hair, beating her head against the wall with a face bathed in tears the size of lima beans. When Yarme finally took her back to bed, she proved to him that he wasn’t yet familiar with all the cunning tricks she knew for arousing and satisfying a man. Yarme demanded to know who...