In My Father’s Court

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An author’s memories of experiences and observations

My wife Sandy and I spent the first weekend of this month at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. We were among the 50 or so students who attended a program entitled “The Family Singer: Three Siblings and their Stories.” Under the able guidance of Professor Anita Norich from the University of Michigan, we compared and contrasted – for the most part, in English translations from the Yiddish – the writings of Esther Singer Kreitman (1891-1954), Israel Joshua Singer (1893-1944), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In preparation for the weekend, I read I. B. Singer’s “In My Father’s Court” (1960), published in Yiddish in 1956 as Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub. Singer worked extremely closely with his translators – too closely, some would argue – so that he considered the English versions of the Yiddish his “second originals.”

Singer writes in his “Author’s Note” that his book is “in a certain sense a literary experiment. It is an attempt to combine two styles – that of memoirs and that of belle letters … .” It seems to me that his experiment is an unqualified success, for he manages to transform each of his 49 chapters from pure memoir into a well-crafted and engaging story.

Many of these stories revolve around his father’s rabbinical court: in Yiddish, bet din in Hebrew. The bezdn of Singer’s father, Pinchas Mendel, a Hasidic rabbi, was a room in the family apartment on Krochmalna Street, in a poor section of Warsaw. Singer explains that his father’s bezdn was “a kind of blend of a court of law, synagogue, house of study, and, if you will, psychoanalyst’s office where people of troubled spirit could come to unburden themselves.”

“In My Father’s Court” is a record of the author’s memories of experiences and observations from 1907 to 1918, the years during which the precocious redheaded 3-year-old matured into a 14-year-old adolescent with red side locks and a red beard. More often than not, when holding court, Pinchas Mendel dealt with such relatively simple issues such as whether or not the chicken brought to him for examination was kosher, but sometimes he was forced to grapple with matters of extreme complexity.

Perhaps the most grotesque question the young Isaac heard put to his father was this: “Rabbi, may a man sleep with his dead wife?”

It was a Saturday night in the middle of winter; Pinchas Mendel’s court was crowded with Hasidic men who had come to taste the joy of escorting the Sabbath into the new week. Following a stunned silence, the questioner continued: “My wife died on Friday. I live in a cellar where there are rats. The funeral will take place on Sunday. I cannot leave the corpse on the floor because the rats would, God forbid, gnaw it to bits. I have only one bed. She must lie in that bed. And I, Rabbi, cannot sleep on the floor either. The rats would get me too … . So I want to know, Rabbi, may I lie in bed with this corpse?”

One of the most biographically significant of Singer’s vignettes recalls his visits to the art studio of his brother, Israel Joshua, 11 years his senior; this chapter, “The Studio,” provides a clue to the earliest sources of inspiration leading to Isaac Bashevis’ development as an artist. At first the young Isaac is shocked and embarrassed by the casual – even “loose” – atmosphere in the studio, where “the girls posed nude with no more shame than they would have undressing in their own bedrooms”; but he quickly comes to realize that “artists looked at them differently.” He realized that “here the body was respected; there was more to a boy than the ability to study.”

“This was quite a change from my father’s studio, but it seems to me that this pattern has become inherent in me. Even in my stories it is just one step from the study house to sexuality and back again. Both phases of human existence have continued to interest me.”

Isaac’s older brother, then, with his art and his worldly books “had sown the seeds of heresy in [his] mind.” Like all artists, the young Isaac was beginning to learn how to see things differently, to see magic in the everyday, to see the human psyche as a home for ghosts and demons – real or imagined – to create for himself and ultimately for his readers a world in which the boundary between the natural and the supernatural remains fluid.

Singer began his Nobel Lecture on Dec. 8, 1978, with these words: ` in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and escape that true art always grants.”

As you confront the artistic vision of I. B. Singer in the pages of his numerous books, you may at times be puzzled and at times be disappointed and perhaps at times be enraged, but you will not be bored.

James B. Rosenberg (rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org) is rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington.

Editor’s note: The transliterations of Hebrew and Yiddish used in this column are those of Professor Norich.