Love and Exile Read online

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

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  LOVE AND EXILE

  An Autobiographical Trilogy

  Contents

  The Beginning

  A Little Boy in Search of God

  A Young Man in Search of Love

  Lost in America

  Author’s Note

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  LOVE AND EXILE

  Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1904 in a village near Warsaw, Poland, and grew up in the city’s Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter. Although he initially considered becoming a rabbi like his father, Singer abandoned his religious studies in his twenties in favour of pursuing a career as a writer. He found a job as a proofreader for a Yiddish literary magazine and began to publish book reviews and short stories. In 1935, as the Nazi threat in neighbouring Germany grew increasingly ominous, Singer moved to the United States of America. He settled in New York, where he worked as a journalist for a Yiddish-language newspaper, and in 1940, married a German-Jewish refugee.

  Although Singer published many novels, children’s books, memoirs, essays and articles, he is best known as a writer of short stories. In 1978, he won the Nobel Prize, and he died in Florida in 1991.

  THE BEGINNING

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  1

  Long before I began to write—actually in my early childhood—I became interested in the question: “What differentiates one human being from another?” The problem of human individuality became my problem. I toyed with this riddle too often for a child of my age. I was barely over five years old when my parents, my father, Pinchos Menachem Singer, and my mother, Bathsheba, moved to Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. But unbelievable as this may sound, I already carried the memories of two former homes with me: the village of Leoncin, where I was born and where my father served as a rabbi, and the little town of Radzymin, where my father had become the head of a yeshivah. Both of these places were near the Vistula, the largest river in Poland. I was about three years and five months old when we moved to Radzymin. But I remember Leoncin, and episodes I lived through there, until today. When I told this to my mother in later years she refused to believe me. She questioned me about details, and I convinced her that I was telling the truth. I described each house, each store, and many of the Jewish families who lived there. I also remembered a number of Gentiles, both Poles and Germans: the so-called “Volksdeutschen” who had their own community in the suburbs. I could recall a long walk to the Vistula taken with my sister Hindele and two other girls, as well as the circumcision party of my younger brother Moishe who was three years younger than I. My mother kept saying, “What a memory! Let no evil eye befall you.” Even the summer day we said goodbye to the Leoncin families and rode away in a wagon to Radzymin was still vivid in my memory. In Radzymin I began to attend cheder. My teacher, Reb Fishel, an old man with a long white beard, had his school not far from where we lived. He was the teacher of the Radzymin wonder rabbi when this famous man was a cheder boy. This rabbi had founded the yeshivah in which my father taught. As far as I can remember, Reb Fishel’s house had two rooms: a bedroom and a large room that was both the kitchen and the cheder. Reb Fishel’s old wife always stood at the oven cooking soups or stews in large pots, since the pupils were also fed there. They sat at a long table on two benches. I had never yet heard of a cheder where boys and girls studied together, but there is always an exception to the rule. For some reason Reb Fishel was also teaching a few little girls. None of us had yet learned how to read. All we knew was the alphabet. Reb Fishel had a cat-o’-nine-tails to whip us for misbehaving, but I don’t remember his ever using it. Every weekday he ate cabbage soup for lunch with black bread and washed it down with water from a copper pitcher. On the table he kept a wooden pointer and an alphabet pasted on cardboard. Reb Fishel’s wife had a face with deep wrinkles. Her bonnet had many beads and colored ribbons. She put mushrooms, potatoes, and fried onions into her soups. Each pupil got a bowl, and we had to recite a blessing beforehand at the table. Reb Fishel’s wife took us out to urinate and helped us keep our pants or little skirts dry. Everyone in that cheder was older than I. The boys were also taller and stronger, and they made fun of me and played tricks on me. The girls protected me. The boys considered it beneath their masculine dignity to play with the girls, but I was too young to be a male chauvinist. In the courtyard, the girls and I played with shards, a broken spoon, an old shoe, and other such toys that Reb Fishel’s wife had thrown into the garbage. We sat on logs and told stories. We played husband-and-wife games. I was the father, one of the girls was my wife, and the other two or three were our children. I went to the synagogue—some shed—to pray while my wife cooked a meal for me. I pretended to pray, saying, “Munia, munia, munia,” nonsense syllables. This was my prayer. Soon my wife gave me a little sand in the broken spoon. This was my lunch or my supper. The boys laughed at us and called me “donkey monkey.” Sometimes the boys threw a chip of wood at us, a pebble, or spat. The oldest girl, Esther, cursed them with the words: “You should spit with blood and pus,” something she must have heard from the grown-ups.

  The most important memory of Radzymin was a fire in the wonder rabbi’s court. It happened on a Friday. Two thick pillars of smoke went up from the rabbi’s study house. Bearded neighborhood Jews were saving scrolls of the Torah, volumes of the Talmud, and other holy books from the fire. Housewives packed garments and linens into sheets, bound them together, and brought them into an orchard near the house in which we lived. Young men carried buckets of water from the well. Both men and women were screaming—warning one another not to desecrate the approaching Sabbath, God forbid.

  Already in Radzymin I began to realize how different our family was from the others. Our family was made up of unique characters. My father did not wear a cap like the other Jews, but a round velvet hat. He wore no boots with high uppers, but half shoes. He was not a merchant, the owner of a store, but stood all day at a lectern studying large volumes and writing small letters in a composition notebook. Once when I asked him what he was writing he said, “Commentaries.” And when I asked him what commentaries were he said, “The Torah is bottomless. No matter how much one studies it, one can never grasp all of it. The deeper you dig into the Torah, the more treasures you uncover. Without the Torah the world would not exist. With the letters of the Torah, God has created Heaven and Earth.”

  I thought a lot about those words. Was my father trying to create a new heaven and a new earth? Sometimes he wrote a line and then erased it. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and then wiped it on his skullcap. While studying he drank many glasses of watery tea and smoked a long pipe. Not far from our house lived the father of a girl who studied at Reb Fishel’s. Her name was Dvorele. Her father was a coachman and owned a wagon and a horse. Sometimes he took Dvorele with him, and they traveled far to where the sky and the earth merged. Why didn’t my father have a cart and a horse? I wondered. Why didn’t he own a store where one could buy candy, halvah, cookies, chocolate bits? I asked my mother the reason, but she never gave me a clear answer. All she could say was, “We are different.” One boy in the cheder named Benjamin always had toys in his pockets: a whistle, a colored pencil, tin foil, or gilded buttons. The house where his parents lived was decorated with pictures, flowerpots, copper pans, a brass pestle and mortar, trays that looked like silver. In our house there was nothing but books. I used to play with the books, turning the pages back and forth. Sometimes I found among the pages a red hair from my father’s beard or a thread from the fringes of his prayer shawl. These were considered sacred objects one was not permitted to throw away. Since there was always talk in our house about God, I asked my father, “Papa, does God have a beard?” My father
smiled, thought it over and said, “You are not allowed to say such things.”

  “Why not?”

  “God has no body. However, everything that exists on Earth has its counterpart in Heaven. Here everything is matter; there everything is spirit.”

  “What is spirit?” I asked.

  “Soul.”

  “What is soul?”

  “No one can see the soul or touch it,” my father said. “But without the soul, one cannot live.”

  I wanted to ask more questions, but my father said, “Please, let me study.”

  In the kitchen it was somewhat cozier than in my father’s study. True, my mother also read a book, but it was not as large and heavy as my father’s volumes. A fire was burning in the oven and a soup was boiling. Once in a while my mother put some kindling wood into the oven. I watched it catch fire, making crackling sounds as it burned. My mother did not wear a bonnet like Reb Fishel’s wife, but a wig. When she took it off for a second I saw red hairs sprouting from her skull. She immediately put the wig back on and secured it with hair pins. Her skirt was so long it covered her ankles. One could only see the points of her shoes. “Mama, what are you reading?” I would ask, and she would answer, “You see, it’s a book.”

  “What is written there?”

  “It is written that people should be good to one another.”

  “Benjamin isn’t good to Dvorele,” I said. “He pulled her hair. Is this being good?”

  “No, my child. This isn’t right.”

  “Will God punish him?”

  “Not immediately. But one is not allowed to pull another child’s hair. If you do something wrong to someone, you have to apologize.”

  “He stuck his tongue out at her.”

  “This is not nice.”

  “Mama, I love Dvorele,” I said.

  My mother raised her eyes from the book. “Is that so? Why do you love her?”

  “Because her papa has a horse.”

  My mother smiled. “Is this a reason for loving her? Oh, you talk like a little fool. You love a girl because she’s clever, gentle, friendly. Anyone can buy a horse for twenty rubles.”

  “Mama, does a horse have a soul?”

  My mother knit her brows and said, “Don’t ask me so many questions, one after the other. Let me read my book.”

  “I also want to read a book.”

  “You will read when you grow up. You will study all the books. For the time being, go out and play with the children.”

  2

  Krochmalna Street in Warsaw was always full of people, and they all seemed to be screaming. One day there was a fire and the firemen came with their wild horses. The firemen wore brass helmets and dragged along fire hoses. Another day someone got run over by a cart and an ambulance came blaring its sirens. Once an automobile passed by—a horseless vehicle—and crowds gathered to gape at the wonder. People in our courtyard, and even some of the visitors in our house, constantly told harrowing stories about the revolution in 1905, the strikes, and how Jewish boys and girls had undertaken to dethrone the Tsar. They shot at Russian officials and threw bombs. On Bloody Wednesday hundreds of those rebels marched to city hall demanding a constitution, and most of them were killed. Blood streamed through the gutter. Those who remained were chained and exiled to Siberia. Many of these tales I did not understand, but in 1908 I felt the turmoil behind them.

  We lived in a walk-up in Warsaw, and we had to learn to climb stairs. Our apartment had a balcony, and high buildings, slanted roofs, broad gates, and stores could be seen from there. The windows were open in the summer, and grown-up girls sang songs with trilling voices. In some of the windows there were cages with parrots that spoke like people, whistled, screeched, even uttered profanities. I had never seen it before, but some of the Jews kept dogs. My mother complained that Warsaw was a Gehenna, but my sister Hindele and my brother Joshua, both already adults, were delighted with the big city. Hindele stood for hours at the window observing the passers-by. Girls in short-sleeved blouses with gauze necklines wore hats with flowers and feathers and carried pocketbooks. My father warned Joshua not to look at those salacious females who uncovered their flesh to arouse men to evil thoughts. But my brother never heeded his warning.

  In his debates with my father, Joshua questioned God’s intentions and my father kept defending Him. Joshua mentioned that in the war with Japan tens of thousands of innocent soldiers were killed. Ships were sunk with their entire crews. In the city of Kesheniev and in many other Russian cities there were pogroms against the Jews. How could God see all this and keep silent? Can a God like this be called merciful? My father choked on the answers. God has given man free choice and he could choose between good and evil, between life and death. Besides, we cannot grasp God with our little brains. Those innocent people who perished were martyrs and their sacred souls will live on in Paradise.

  My father was not the only one on God’s side. Chassidim came to our house and told of the miracles worked by their wonder rabbis and of their great piety. One of those hangers-on was my father’s former pupil in Leoncin, a young man by the name of Mattes. Mattes was a follower of the Bratslav rabbi—one of a sect nicknamed “dead Chassidim.” They were disciples of a rabbi who had died some hundred years ago, Rabbi Nachman who preached religion through joy. Mattes would speak about this dead rabbi and dance. He cried out Rabbi Nachman’s slogans: “As long as your candle burns, everything can be corrected.” Mattes would sing out the verse in the book Ethics of the Fathers: “If I’m not for myself, who will be for me? And if I’m only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

  I was listening to everything: to the stories of the Chassidim, to my brother’s debates with my parents, to the arguments of the litigants who came for a “Din Torah,” mostly a peaceful settlement of a business argument. I was especially interested in the conflict between couples who sought divorce. There were also struggles in our own household. My sister Hindele accused my mother of not loving her. I have heard her weep and cry out, “You don’t love me, this is why you are pushing to marry me off to anybody who comes along. If you could, you would send me far away behind the Mountains of Blackness.” Young as I was, I grasped that Hindele was telling the truth. My mother could not stand her constant complaints. Hindele suffered from nerves. This is what the doctor told us. He applied electric treatments to her head and prescribed massages and pills twice a day, but they did not help. Several times Hindele attempted to jump out the window. Still, people liked her. Our neighbors praised her looks, her light skin, brown hair, and blue eyes. She, too, waged war against my father’s extreme piety. She wanted to dress according to fashion, to attend the Yiddish theater and marry a modern young man, not some yeshivah boy who lived on charity. However, because my father could not afford to give her a dowry the matchmakers tried to marry her off to some widower, divorced man, or someone twice as old as she was. Hindele cried, laughed, tore the hair from her head, and threatened to drown herself in the Vistula. Joshua said that Hindele was suffering from hysteria.

  The summer was over and then the winter, but I was still not enrolled in a new cheder. I learned everything at home: to recite the prayers and also to read storybooks in Yiddish—tales about kings, princesses, frightening events about devils, imps, dybbuks, vampires. My brother Joshua bought the Yiddish newspaper every morning and I tried to read this too. My father maintained that all the secular writers were unbelievers, liars, mockers. Their writings were an abomination. About the Yiddish theater my father said that charlatans sit there all day long, eat pork, play around with loose women, and speak profanities. But my brother said that the theater was a part of culture. He praised the Yiddish writers Mendele Mocher Sforim, Shalom Aleichem, Peretz, as well as the mother of the Yiddish theater, Esther Rachael Kaminsky and her play, Mirele Efrat. Joshua brought home translations into Yiddish of Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Turgenev, Knut Hamsun, Mark Twain. He called their writings literature, and he said that to write the way they do, one must have ta
lent and great knowledge of the human soul. My mother upbraided Joshua and Hindele for reading these worldly books, but she herself used to glance into them. In the newspaper Der Haynt they published a novel in a serial with the title The Bloody Lady—a story of a woman who drove men crazy with her caprices and demands. Some of her admirers fought duels over her and killed one another. Some sent spies to follow her. They showered her with gold and precious gifts. She possessed a devilish beauty. Behind her veiled face looked out two fiery black eyes that drove men to madness.

  Not only were men driven to madness and to death in Petersburg and Paris but also on Krochmalna Street where we lived. A tailor’s assistant in Number 11 had fallen in love with the daughter of a Chassid, and when her parents refused to consent to their marriage the young man threw himself to the ground from the fourth floor. A maid whose groom-to-be stole her dowry and ran off to America with another woman poisoned herself with iodine. A striker, who was sentenced to life in the Citadel prison, poured kerosene on his clothes and burned himself to cinders. He had left a letter written in blood to his bride-to-be: “I’m dying so that you should live in a world of freedom.”

  Every day I learned the most astonishing things from these newspapers. In Italy a Jew was Prime Minister, only one step away from being a king. In London a Jew was given the high title of Lord. The Tsar wanted to borrow money from Baron Rothschild, but the Baron refused him credit. There were also articles about science: the earth is fifty times as large as the moon. Some of the stars are as large as the sun or even larger, and many times as bright. In Italy, in Portugal, in the. United States of America, and in other countries earthquakes took place where hundreds and thousands of people were killed. There were stories in this newspaper about giants, midgets, about a baby born with two heads, and Siamese twin brothers who were doomed never to be separated. Meteors fell from the sky and formed deep holes in the earth. Volcanoes spat out fiery lava. Rivers overflowed their banks and covered whole villages. In China thousands of people starved to death. In India a man walked barefoot on burning coals. In America a millionaire gave a birthday party for his sixteen-year-old daughter, and the flowers alone cost five thousand dollars or ten thousand rubles.