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.
5
‘Would you believe it? In all this time Channah Basha never visited Manhattan. The subway terrified her with its din and noise. There was a Yiddish theater on Hopkinson Avenue, and once in a while I took her there. Sometimes they showed a Yiddish movie. There were moments when I thought I ought to put an end to this false game I was playing. Why shouldn’t she enjoy my riches? In the summer I wanted to rent a cottage in the Catskill for her. I offered her a trip with me to California. But she wouldn’t hear of it. Air conditioning did not exist then, and I wanted to buy her a fan. She refused it. She had a deathly fear of machines. She wouldn’t allow me to install a telephone. The one thing she accepted was a radio; it took her a long time to learn how to turn on the Yiddish stations. This is Channah Basha—so will she be until her last day.
‘My dear friend, I promised to make it short and I will keep my word. Bessie died. She had a quarrel with her gigolo—the pimp—and she went alone to Hong Kong. What she was looking for there I will never know. One day she collapsed in a restaurant and died. It was 1937. In all the years I had been coming to Channah Basha, we promised ourselves that if something happened to Bessie we would get married. But somehow I postponed telling her. There could be no thought of living with Channah Basha in the ruins of Blake Avenue. It was just as impossible to take her to my ten-room apartment on Park Avenue. My neighbors were all snooty rich. I had a Negro maid and an Irish housekeeper. I went to parties and I gave parties. No one spoke a word of Yiddish in my crowd. How could I bring Channah Basha into this Gentile-like world? With whom would she be able to talk? Besides, to find out that I had been lying to her all these years might be a shock that would tear our love apart like a spider web. I began to plan to go with her to Palestine, maybe to settle somewhere in Jerusalem or at Rachel’s grave, but Hitler was already baring his teeth. At a time like that it was good to be in America, not wandering around in faraway countries.
‘I put things off from day to day, from month to month. Why deny it—I wasn’t completely faithful to her during all those years. As long as I didn’t have true love I spat on frivolous women, but now that I had a true love it suited me to play around with others too. When women know that a man is alone they offer themselves by the dozen. I became a real Don Juan. I frequented nightclubs and restaurants where you meet the big shots. My name was even mentioned in the gossip columns. But these phony loves were enjoyable only because in Brownsville on Blake Avenue a real love waited. Who said it? One ounce of truth has more weight than ten tons of lies. I figured one way, then another, and meanwhile the war broke out. There was no place for us to flee to any more—unless, perhaps, Mexico or South America. But what would we two do there?
‘My dear man, nothing has changed up today, except that I have become an old man and Channah Basha is in her fifties. But you should see her; her hair is still gold and her face is that of young girl. It is said that this comes from pure conscience. Now that there was a war and she heard how Jews were tortured in Europe, she began to cry; she went on crying for years. She fasted and recited prayers, like God-fearing matrons in my village. Some organization advertised that they mailed packages to Russia, and every cent that I gave her Channah Basha sent there. She was so upset that she forgot I was a poor insurance agent and she took large sums of money from me I was supposed to have been saving for my old age. If she hadn’t been Channah Basha she would have recognized that something was wrong. But suspicion was not in her nature. She hardly knew the value of money—especially when it was in checks. I knew that the shrewd people in charge of those packages swindled her right and left, but I also knew that if even one dollar out of hundred served its purpose the deed was good. Besides, if I had told Channah Basha that people with beards and sidelocks stole money from refugees, she could have suffered a heart attack. Finally, I gave her so much that I had to tell her I was connected with a relief organization and they provided me with funds. She questioned nothing. Later, when Palestine became a Jewish state and the troubles with the Arab began, she again tried to help. Believe it or not, I am still getting money from those non-existent committees.’
(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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