I.J.Singer (1893-1944) was concerned for Yiddish to break out of its confines, to achieve a more modern style. His younger brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer, on whom he was a major influence, said that Israel Joshua refused to romanticise Jewish life and was one of the first Yiddish writers to explore sexuality. His writing was often sensual, even exploring male homosexuality to some extent, albeit in a somewhat hostile way.

He wanted to break away from what he the saw as the confines of a Yiddish literature concerned with the folksy or the didactic and saw the messianic strain in Judaism as a destructive force, a barren temptation and refused to provide any sort of “ideological haven“ in his books. There was no alternative for the Jews but to accept modernity even though they could never fully be integrated into it. Hence, much of his writing was rather fatalistic. His characters strove to break free from the symbols of Jewish religious tradition, but could not do so. In the end they were destined to share a collective fate (most gruesomely in the journey to the gas chambers, which he could not have predicted).

Enthused by Communism, in 1917 Singer chose to live in Bolshevik Russia, but by 1919 he had become disillusioned and returned to Poland. In the mid 1920s he was commissioned by the editor of an American Yiddish newspaper to write a series of reports on life in the Soviet Union. A collection of these — The New Russia — was published in 1927, and provided material for his novel, Chaver Nachman published in English in 1938 as East of Eden. This was, perhaps, a misplaced title because, as Anita Norich has suggested, there is no real banishment from an Eden. The characters simply come to realise that it is one more illusion. Nachman, a revolutionary socialist harassed by the Polish authorities, flees to the Soviet Union, where he believes that his socialist dreams have been realised. Conditions are hard, but he just about manages to enable his family to survive. Though he brushes aside these difficulties as temporary, when he seeks to defend a fellow worker, he is accused of counter-revolution, and eventually he is expelled from the country.

Singer“s writing could be sparse, direct, vivid in its depiction of landscape, character and social life, generally against a background of profound historical change. In Spring, (1937) for example, he shows the impact of the first world war and the establishment of independent Poland on the life of a Jewish family who survive only by fleeing from the countryside to Warsaw. In The Brothers Ashkenazi (1934-5) probably his greatest novel, he chronicles the life of a family of Jewish textile magnates in the booming industrial centre of Lodz before the World War One, where the inexorable forces of capitalism and social transformation dominate. The central character, Max (formerly Simcha Meyer) is trying to “pass“ in the gentile world. Physically he does escape from the ghetto, but in reality he cannot escape from what he is. Nonetheless, he is impelled by a self-delusion, which allows him initial financial success, but which ultimately leads to his destruction, overwhelmed as he is by the outside forces of war, revolution and pogroms.

Singer“s most successful work was Yoshe Kalb (1933) which was immediately translated into English and also dramatised for the Yiddish stage by Maurice Schwartz. Set against a background of Hasidic rigidity in the shtetl*, it is a story of forbidden love, guilt and spiritual expiation. Hence it is basically a religious work in judgement of the religious. That, perhaps, explains its success on the New York stage, where a generation of Jews were trying to come to terms with their own rejection of the old Jewish religious values in favour of the new American ones. Yoshe Kalb was to pay dearly for his rebelliousness. A split personality, he became the ultimate homeless wanderer, not now the Jew driven out by the non-Jewish world, but an outcast even amongst the Jews themselves.

The rise of Nazism was to provide the basis for Singer“s last major work The Family Carnovsky (1943) where he deals with the futility and tragedy of the German Jews“ attempts to assimilate. The psychological element of rejection of the self becomes more explicitly an exploration in Jewish self-hatred, which Singer could resolve only by resorting to a melodramatic ending.

Singer believed that Jews could recognise their situation, and that this was where the writer could help, but that they could do little to alter it. Hence they were threatened by an endless repetition of their fate, rather than destruction. The Holocaust could not so easily be assimilated to his views and, in the end Singer had come to accept that if his literary imagination could remain homeless, something more secure had to be found for the Jews themselves.

“Yet where did these barracks [“The Barracks“ are where Nachman and numerous others live in Moscow.— ed.] stand? In that country to the East where the workers had flung the chains of slavery from off their limbs and had become the masters. The walls of the barracks were covered with slogans which spoke of proletarian unity, of the liberation of woman, of the joys of the collective life, of joyous labour and creativity. But there seemed to be no connection between these slogans and pictures and the people among whom he lived.

They were poor, unwashed, ill-clad, and wicked, frightfully wicked. They were divided in groups and categories: those that earned more and those that earned less, the higher ones and the lower ones. Workers envied their foremen, foremen envied their directors. Ordinary workers hated the pace-setters, weak workers looked with envy on stronger workers, unskilled and clumsy workers on skilled and lucky workers, small earners on big earners, the rank and file on the higher-ups. In the kitchens the women fought and wrangled about food, about their miserable pots and pans, about the superior quality of someone“s meals, the inferior quality of another“s. Thieving was a common thing in the barracks; there were fights over pieces of bread which disappeared in the midst of a meal. Women jostled one another, fought one another, around the big stove, for the right of putting on a pot. There was a constant squabbling about whose turn it was to bring in firewood. No-one wanted to lend a hand in cleaning up the barracks; everyone swept his little heap of dirt toward the middle of the barracks.

Children cried and begged for bread, and their mothers answered them with blows. Women had scenes with their husbands because they caught them making up to other men“s wives. The night was a bedlam. Children cried, young husbands and wives whispered, some made love, others quarrelled. Everything could be heard, it was impossible to hide anything from the prying eyes of neighbours, neither one“s joys nor one“s sorrows. Men who went to work on night shifts were afraid to leave their wives with so many young fellows in the barracks. Older people were furious with younger ones because the latter sang and played in the nights. The healthy were irritated by the coughing and groaning of the sick. People tried to hide from one another; they were afraid to speak out, lest someone report their words. Envy, hatred, bitterness, evil, and suffering reigned in the big barracks, the walls of which were adorned with slogans. Worse than the filth, the darkness, and the hunger was the hatred between the human beings. There was continuous fighting and quarrelling.“ (p389-9 East of Eden)