Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children's Stories and Childhood Memoirs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children’s Stories and Childhood Memories Diana Arlene Chlebek (bio) Alida Allison, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children’s Stories and Childhood Memories. New York: Twayne, 1996. In the last chapter of her book, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children’s Stories and Childhood Memories, Alida Allison explains the universal appeal of his writing by quoting from the author’s own description of his paradoxical and marginal status as a creative man, “What It Takes To Be a Jewish Writer”: “The creative writer must have deep roots in his milieu, but he must not be entirely of it. . . . The true artist is simultaneously a child of his people, and a stepchild . . .” (135). Allison’s critique focuses on this perspective of Singer as a writer of double vision through the lens of his stories for the young. The premise of her book is that there is an inextricable link between Singer’s autobiography, both in the adult and juvenile versions, and this phase of his writing career. She observes that the author’s testament of his childhood coincides with the onset of his productive period as a children’s writer quite late in his life. The frame of her biographical-critical approach is itself braced by one of Singer’s most passionate and persistent beliefs about the need for specificity in literature, that “. . . there is no literature without roots. . . . The more a writer is rooted in his environment, the more he is understood by all people; the more national he is, the more international he becomes . . .” (1). The first chapter appropriately begins with the roots of Singer’s psychic and writing life in an analysis of A Day of Pleasure, his autobiography for juveniles that stresses those unique aspects of both his Jewish heritage and his own inheritance of his family’s emotional and intellectual outlook that made Singer a born storyteller. In this regard Allison’s account of Singer’s childhood and the stories he spun from his early life contributes a unique perspective toward a comprehension of his work. She underscores the orality of Singer’s art and its rootedness in Jewish and Yiddish culture, particularly its folkloric basis. There is a passing reference to Roderick McGillis’s important study on the loss of orality in the modern world in the context of children’s poetry. A more extensive treatment of the theoretical underpinnings of this topic would have been helpful here, particularly in relation to Singer’s exploitation of the strategies of oral narrative that are the common structural links between his children’s stories and both the folklore and daily tales of shtetl life he absorbed as a child. [End Page 135] The fact that all of Singer’s works for children have been initially published as translated works with the author’s contribution as both co-translator and co-editor is an especially intriguing aspect of the creative process in his writing. Toward this analysis Allison has incorporated valuable new material hitherto untapped, both through interviews with Elizabeth Shub, Singer’s translator and editor, and through the revelation of his manuscripts of the children’s stories that both he and Shub reworked extensively. Singer has stressed that humor and poetry are virtually untranslatable from one language to another, especially from a highly dramatic idiom like Yiddish to a leaner and more logical one like English (“Translating” 111). However, in her explication of Singer’s shlemiel and Chelm stories, Allison presents an incisive analysis of how, during the process of Singer’s and Shub’s co-translation and co-editing, rearranged structural elements in the narratives and a judicious choice of English vocabulary manage to convey much of the original punch of the Yiddish jokes and exaggerations about Singer’s fools. Allison’s overall approach to the body of Singer’s writing for children is through a breakdown by chronology and format. Several of her chapters focus, in order of publication, on his major collections, such as Zlateh the Goat and When the Shlemiel Went to Warsaw; a later chapter analyzes as a group Singer’s single-story and picture books. This categorization is helpful in her discussion of the formal aspects of each collection of...