Mark Klempner's Blog - Posts Tagged "yiddish-writers"

I'm continuing my private Isaac Bashevis Singer festival because every time I read a story of his, it speaks uncannily to what I've been thinking, feeling, or going through. Read three short story collections ( "Short Friday," "Crown of Feathers", "The Spinoza of Market Street") now on to a novel, "The Slave."

He came from the same town in Poland as my paternal grandmother and they knew each other as children, in fact, I think he came to her house for cheder (religious lessons) at one point. She carried on a correspondence with him in Yiddish. Good reason for me to learn Yiddish.

More than any other writer I know, he's able to bring to life the pre-WWII Jewish community. However, I also the stories set in New York, as well as those set in Israel.

I wish I could have met him while he was still with us! Yet his literary works throb with life and I feel his spirit as I read them.

About two thirds through "Short Friday," a slim book of I.B. Singer's short stories, I came upon "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy." This story, which takes up just 24 pages of the mass-market paperback, was the basis for an entire feature film. And it won an Oscar too. I makes me marvel at the short story form . . . how much can be done with so few words.

I've started reading Singer's novel "The Slave" and notice the pace is a lot slower and there is much more description, both of the characters and the settings. This is fine but it doesn't necessarily make it better than the short stories. Which makes me wonder why Singer chose to turn some of his ideas into novels and others into short stories.

It would seem that a more complex story that takes place over a longer time would require a novel. And yet "Yentl" is quite complex and takes place over a period of several years. Some of Singer's short stories span decades. I really love the short story form because it cuts away everything unessential. The benefit of novels, though, is that when the reader is wishing the story wouldn't end, it doesn't—at least not so soon.

I have been noticing what marvelous descriptions Isaac Singer provides of fictional people. Unless he had a phenomenal memory, I can't imagine that he came up with these descriptions while sitting at his desk....my guess is that he tried in his notebooks to describe people he saw in real life, and then assigned some of those descriptions to the characters in his novels.

Example from Enemies, A Love Story:

Next to her stood a tiny man wearing a felt hat with a feather in it, a checked jacket that was too light for a cold wintry day, a pink shirt, striped trousers, tan shoes, and a tie that was a mixture of yellow, red, and green. He appearly outlandishly comical, as if he had just flown in from a hot climate and hadn't had time to change his clothes. His head was long and narrow and he had a hooked nose, sunken cheeks, and a pointed chin. His dark eyes had a humorous expression, as if the visit he was making was nothing more than a joke.

I heard that Singer would often sit in a cafeteria on the lower East Side (or West Side, not sure) for hours each day, sometimes writing, sometimes reading, sometimes visiting with people whom he knew or who recognized him and came over to chat with him. I bet that was where he did these literary sketches of people.

I had to be on public busses a lot today and I took out my notebook and tried to do a literary sketch of the person in front of me. I filled three pages just from looking at the back of this person. I am going to try to remember to do at least one of these sketches whenever I take a bus; I could feel that it was sharpening up my powers of observation and my ability to describe what I observed. And who knows, maybe I'll use part of one of these sketches when I someday need to describe someone in a novel.