Books: Nobel Prize for I.B. Singer

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An inexhaustible fantasist of manias and superstitions

I don't know," Isaac Bashevis Singer I used to muse, "when I sit down to write I have a feeling that I'm talking maybe to millions or maybe to nobody." Last week he could be assured of at least 18 avid readers—the members of the Swedish Academy, which awarded the 74-year-old writer the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature for his "impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life."

Signs of that life began in Poland, where the son and grandson of rabbis was afflicted by skepticism. "I began to doubt," he recalls, "not the power of God, but all the traditions and dogmas." Deterred from a religious vocation, Isaac followed his equally radical brother Israel Joshua to the journals of Warsaw. In his spare time, the young reporter wrote a handful of stories and a dark novel about a false messiah, Satan in Goray, that prefigured his later works.

In the early '30s, just before the Holocaust, the Singer brothers left Poland for the promised city. In New York Isaac worked for the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper. "I remember thinking in those days," says the laureate, "if only somebody would guarantee me $15 a week, I could sit down and really do some work." The money was a long time coming. For two decades he was supported by his second wife, Alma, who worked as a salesclerk in Manhattan department stores. By the time of his brother's death in 1944, Singer had become a recognized writer—but only to readers of a dying language. One of them was a young novelist named Saul Bellow, who translated Singer's tale, Gimpel the Fool, the story of a village simpleton transfigured by the belief that the next world "will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception." Remembers Singer: "This story brought me so much popularity—somehow I have the strange feeling that all the literary people in America read that one issue of Partisan Review."

From Bellow he went on to employ dozens of translators—including Joseph, I.J. Singer's son. Though Isaac Bashevis Singer has long since gained fluency in English, he continues to write in his mother tongue. "It strikes one as a kind of inspired madness," Irving Howe once wrote. Counters Singer: "Yiddish contains vitamins that other languages don't have." Choice of vitamins is not his only idiosyncrasy. A vegetarian who refuses to swat flies, a firm believer in the supernatural, Singer has mysteriously grown more prolific with age: since his 50th birthday he has written eight novels, ten children's books, four memoirs and scores of short stories. All of them are suffused with, in the Nobel committee's memorable phrase, "the author's apparently inexhaustible psychological fantasy ... of manias and superstitions, fanatical hopes and dreams, the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power."