When he received the National Book Award for Children’s Literature in 1970, Isaac Bashevis Singer made a list of some of the reasons he liked to write for children, including, “They have no use for psychology,” and, “They detest sociology.” Also, he wrote, children still believe in “such obsolete stuff” as “God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation.”
The list was read in Stockholm eight years later, when the prolific author accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his own short address to the academy, he noted that children are increasingly growing up without faith in God, belief in the soul or even ethics.
The son of a Hasidic rabbi and younger brother to a religious skeptic (who was also a successful novelist), Singer grew up in a Polish village and immigrated to the United States in 1935, a few years before the Nazis invaded. He wrote in Yiddish.
When his short novel “The Penitent” was published in English in 1983, it was promoted as the author’s favorite of all his books. It tells the story of a Jew who comes to America, becomes a successful businessman and a philandering husband, and then, in a desperate search for salvation, flees to Israel and rediscovers his Jewish faith.
But in an afterward to the story, the author states that he does not fully share his protagonist’s rediscovered traditional faith. He explained that he remains “bewildered and shocked by the misery and brutality of life.”
“To me, a belief in God and protest against the laws of life are not contradictory,” he wrote. “I feel therefore that there is no basic difference between rebellion and prayer.”
Singer’s religious position was, by his own admission, idiosyncratic; he described it once as “a sort of kasha of mysticism, deism and skepticism, well-suited to my intellect and temperament.”
Nonetheless, compare what the author wrote about “rebellion and prayer” to what Pope Francis has said on more than one occasion. Faith is not just silent acceptance or a “certainty that secures us from doubt and perplexity,” but it also means “to argue with God and show him our bitterness without ‘pious pretenses,’” the pope said during a weekly general audience Dec. 28, 2016.
Two years earlier, the pope told his listeners to pray as Moses did – freely and with good arguments. “And also scold the Lord a little: ‘Hey, you promised me this, and you haven’t done it …’ Like that, like you talk with a friend.”
Singer – who claimed, “We must believe in free will; we have no choice” – created a figure of innocent faith and hope in one of his most praised stories, “Gimpel the Fool.”
After a lifetime of being abused and made the butt of practical jokes, the guileless Gimpel, under the influence of “the Spirit of Evil,” plans an act of revenge against the people of his village. But he receives a warning when his unfaithful dead wife appears to him in a dream. “I never deceived anyone but myself,” she tells him. “I’m paying for it all, Gimpel. They spare you nothing here.”
“A false step now, and I’d lose Eternal Life,” Gimpel thinks. “But God gave me His help,” and he abandons his plan.
The story ends with Gimpel as an old man. He says he is often comforted in his dreams by his late wife, who he sees not in torment but with a shining face and eyes “as radiant as the eyes of a saint.”
“No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world,” Gimpel says. When it is his time to die, he says, he will die joyfully. “Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception,” the still childlike Gimpel says. “God be praised: There even Gimpel cannot be deceived.”
Singer was once asked to respond to a critic who claimed his work was not humanistic or moral and didn’t advance the betterment of society. “He might be right,” the Nobel Laureate responded with apparent sincere modesty. “Who knows?”
Many of us tend to see ourselves as the protagonist in the epic saga of our own lives. Singer, recognized as a major figure in world literature, seemed to hold the more modest view: that each person plays a small but important part in a much larger, and too often incomprehensible, story.
“Life is God’s novel,” he once said. “Let him write it.”
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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