Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in Poland in 1904, emigrated to New York in 1935, when he began writing in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward. He is the author of many novels and stories and winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature. Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus.
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‘Where should I begin? I was born in a pious home. My parents were old-fashioned Jews, but even when I was still a cheder boy I heard about love. Does one have to look far for it? It’s right in the Torah. Jacob loved Rachel, and when Laban, the cheat, substituted Leah in the dark night Jacob labored another seven years. Well, and what about King David and King Solomon with the Queen of Sheba and all that stuff? Book peddlers used to come to our village and they brought story books—two pennies to buy a book, one penny to borrow it. I was a poor boy, but whenever I could get hold of a penny I spent it on reading. When I came to America and I earned three dollars a week, I spent my last cent on books or on tickets for the Yiddish theater. In those times actors were still actors and not sticks of wood. When they appeared on stage, the boards burned under their feet. I saw all of them! Adler, Mme. Liptzin, Schildkraut, Kessler, Tomashevsky—every one of them. Well, and the playwrights of those times—Goldfaden, Jacob Gordin, Lateiner! Each word had to do with love, and you could have kissed each one. When you read my book you will see that I had no luck in my marriage. I fell for a rotten woman—a bitter piece, a bitch. How she ruined my days and how she set my children against me is all there. As long as I was young and poor I worked in a sweatshop, and then I took to peddling. I had no time for love. I lived in a dark alcove and I couldn’t afford to buy clothes. We worked then fourteen hours a day, and when it was busy even eighteen. When it became slack we had barely a crust to eat. If your stomach is empty you forget above love.
‘I built my first bungalow quite a number of years after I married, and I soon became so successful it was as though Elijah had blessed me. One day I had nothing and the next money poured in from all sides. But I still worked hard, perhaps even harder than ever. No matter how successful a man is, he can slip in no time from the top of the heap to the very bottom. You have to be on the watch every minute. As long as I had a job or carried a pack on my shoulders and peddled, at least I rested on the Sabbath. With prosperity, my Sabbaths too were gone. My wife got wind that I had spare dollar and began to tear pieces off me. We moved from the Lower East Side and took an apartment uptown. The children came one after the other and there were doctors, private schools, and the devil knows what else. My wife—Bessie was her name—bedecked herself with so much jewelry you could hardly see her. She came from petty and mean people, and when these get the smell of money they lose their heads. I was in my later thirties, and I still had not tasted real love. If I had ever loved my wife it was only from Monday to Tuesday. We quarreled constantly, and she threatened me with jail and judges. She kept reminding me that in America a lady is something so special you have to bow to her as though she were an idol. She carried on until I couldn’t look at her any more. When I heard her voice I felt like vomiting. She indulged in all sorts of trickery, but she still expected me to be a husband to her. Impossible! We no longer shared a bedroom. By this time I had an office, and secretly I got a little apartment in one of my buildings. I’m sorry to admit it, but if you hate a wife you’re bound to care less for the children. After Bessie, that fishwife, realized we would never be close again, she began to look for others. She did it so crudely men were afraid to start anything with her. She snatched at their sleeves like Potiphar’s wife. I know what you want to ask me—why didn’t I get a divorce. First of all, in those times to get a divorce you had to jump through hoops, knocking on the doors of the courts and so on. Today you fly to Reno and in six weeks you are as free as a bird. Secondly, she would have set a bunch of shysters on me and they would have fleeced me of my last penny. Besides, one gets a divorce when one is in love with someone else. If no one is waiting for you, why look for more headaches? I had partners in the business, and even though they had good wives they kept company with loose women. Today these women have become fancy call girls, but a whore is a whore. They all did it—the manufacturers, the jobbers, anyone who could pay. For them it was a game. But if these prostitutes were all you had, you realized your misfortune. It happened more than once that I just looked at one of these sluts and lost my appetite. I would give her a few dollars and run away like a yeshiva boy. I would go to a movie and for hours watch the gangsters shooting one another. So the years passed, and I thought that I would never learn what love was. Do you want to hear more?
‘Yes, of course.’
‘This alone would make a book. When you write it, you will know how to embellish it.’
‘Why embellish? As you tell it is good enough.’
‘Well, writers like to embellish.’
(continued)
I love this story. This hilarious portrait of everyday Main Street characters rings as true today as it did when it was first published back then. The basics are the same and how little things change.
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