Couplings, Confessions and Misadventures
OUT OF the same few ingredients, the same situations and twists and problems, some writers create great stories again and again. Isaac Bashevis Singer did it for the better part of the century, and even in the three years since his death new novels have kept appearing annually like the lost souls of his literary imagination. Meshugah, originally serialized in Yiddish in the early '80s, is the least successful of the posthumous novels: less fresh and searching than The Certificate, a novel of his youth; less morally disturbing than Scum. Without the rich physical and psychological texture of the others, Meshugah (Yiddish for "crazy") sometimes seems to be going through the motions of conjuring from Singer's familiar bag of tricks: love triangles and quadrangles, sudden reversals from disaster to fulfillment and back, relentless questions about good and evil - the spectacle of human folly unravelling under the cold eye of an ironic God. But even if the concoction lacks Singer's customary zest, it clarifies his notions of morality and creativity, and it shows how much more sophisticated this storyteller from a Polish shtetl was than almost any contemporary American.</br></br>Meshugah concerns a group of Polish Jews in New York in 1952, most of them Holocaust survivors who have found disconcerting wealth and freedom in their adopted country. The narrator, Aaron Greidinger, bears a good deal of resemblance to his creator: 47 years old, a pre-war immigrant, a Yiddish writer and radio advice-giver, poor but tasting the beginnings of fame. In rapid order a number of "ghosts" - Jews he imagined destroyed by Hitler - show up to throw Aaron's isolated life into tumult: Max Aberdam, a married, 67-year-old "well-known glutton, guzzler, womanizer" who invests the reparation money of Jewish refugees in the stock market; Miriam Zalkind, his 27-year-old mistress, also married, who is writing a dissertation on Aaron's work; and assorted anarchists, philanthropists and other adulterers.</br></br>The past and present sexual entanglements are too numerous to keep straight, but in the essential one Miriam becomes the lover of Aaron as well as Max. Through the usual sudden appearances, couplings, confessions and misadventures this trio remains remarkably stable, until Aaron discovers the ugly truth about Miriam's wartime life. This sets up the novel's only serious dramatic tension: Should he judge her, leave her, or accept her?</br></br>In some ways the real action appears in the bits of conversation that surface amid the plot contrivances. God always preoccupies Singer's characters: In the post-Hitler world Miriam and Max want to do without Him altogether, dispensing with repentance and regret, but Aaron holds to a "religion of protest," in which "One may believe in God's wisdom and yet deny that He is the source of goodness only. God and mercy are not absolutely synonymous." Aaron's God is not a simple force for good, but He is a force, which accounts for the inseparable mix of tragedy and farce that is Singer's literary signature. When an ex-lover questions Aaron's method of turning his plots upside down, he answers, "It is life's method." God is a novelist and the world His novel, strikingly similar to Singer's.</br></br>AARON'S theology is closely linked with his writing, and through him Singer answers critics of his own writing who want more Zionism, more socialism, more reason, more faith. An anarchist friend asks Aaron, "What will the masses learn from your articles? Love, love, and more love." Aaron replies, "What should I write about - hate?" " `He said,' `she said,' " a rabbi carps. "If he is licentious and she is licentious, what has love to do with this?" The implicit answer is: everything. "A writer should not be a puritan," Aaron says, and elsewhere he claims it is literature's mission "to express the emotions with honesty - savage, antisocial, and contradictory as the emotion might be." What finally binds love and art together is "God's laboratory of freedom."