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The Texture of Reality
In the midst of Advent, our thoughts and prayers linger on the life of the Nazarene, born into a culture and time laden with expectation.  The work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel laureate in literature of the second half of the last century, moves us further in the recollection that our elder brethren in the Covenant point us toward the Nativity. Singer captures  the humor and heartbreak of a "felt life" rich in meaning, one that speaks of the eternal, of a personal relationship with the One God.

by Dino D’Agata

A shtetl called Frampol, situated in Poland, late 19th, early 20th century.  You think of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Orthodox Jewish culture is dogged in its persistence of being a world-within-a-world, dogged in its ability to hearken to another time in the face of, well, dogged modernism.  You think of Chagall, whose airborne figures speak of how the life we see and touch is only a reflection of the life that lies behind it.  You think of Henry James, who in his 1885 essay, “The Art of Fiction,” tells us that the morality of a piece of fiction lies in the amount of “felt life” within it–and you think of Flannery O’Connor who, when asked by an aspiring writer how she evaluated the quality of her own work, responded not by talking about how many Christian ideas her fiction conveys but by mentioning that it all depends on what you can “make live.”

Felt life. That last word, “live,” is the key word that comes to mind when we talk about Isaac Bashevis Singer, and about what makes his work sing with the same buoyancy, the same other-worldly musicality, as Chagall’s paintings, of how time and space for the Jews tasted and smelled before Hitler marched through Europe and attempted to eradicate this “felt life” (perhaps because he hated the intrusion of mysticism it carried with it).  It is the presence of this other world–what Flannery O’Connor, following Maritain, following Aquinas, would call “the anagogical”–that makes Singer, coming from the best of the Hebrew Old Testament tradition, able to give a sentence a texture that evokes a reality in time and space that exhales the infinite at us, the true reality that Gimpel, the Fool, mentions at the end of his saga, when he tell us, “No doubt the world is an entirely imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.” (You think of St. Paul, who tells us how we see things as if in a mirror.) “Whatever may be there, it will be real… without deception.  God be praised:  there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.”

Ghosts and freaks. Originally published in English in 1957, translated from the Yiddish (Singer never wrote in English, even by the end of his life, when he could be seen every morning eating a fried egg at a diner on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, near Columbus Avenue), Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories speaks to us about what Singer was compelled to call ghosts, but which aren’t in fact ghosts. They are only called ghosts for the sake of us terribly modern readers who cannot tolerate the mystical within this world, cannot admit the voice of God speaking through the dead, because these things too strongly wound the intractable grain of rationalism within us.  Fine then–let us call them “ghosts,” much like in Flannery O’Connor’s work we call them “freaks”: those who inhabit the cemetery at Frampol in the story “The Little Shoemakers,” where Abba, an old shoemaker whose sons all leave for America as the Nazis descend on Frampol, finds “a meaningful silence” rising from “the consecrated ground,” when he goes there to give his dead wife, Pesha, news of their children.
Abba is not the only one whose dead wife remains in relationship with him.  Despite all of her cuckolding (which makes Gimpel think, at a certain point, “Today it’s your wife you don’t believe in; tomorrow it’s God Himself you won’t take stock in”), it is in sentences like these that issue forth from the heart of Gimpel where you see how Singer is a latter-day Jewish prophet, because he understands that the world is layered for us mortals in time and space with heaven, hell, and purgatory.  In the end, at the behest of the Evil One, who appears in order to tell Gimpel there is no God in the beyond, only a “thick mire,” Gimpel decides to take revenge on everyone who has ever wronged him.  A baker by trade, he empties his urine pot into the batch of dough that night so that the following day all of Frampol will eat his waste.  From purgatory, Elka, his wife, who on her deathbed repented of her sins against him, appears to him:  “You fool,” she says.  “Because I was false is everything false too?  I never deceived anyone but myself.  I’m paying for it all, Gimpel.”  So Gimpel repents.  “A false step now and I’d lose Eternal Life,” he tells us.  “But God gave me His help.  I seized the long shovel and took out the loaves, carried them into the yard, and started to dig a hole in the frozen earth.” 

A God of the people. Gimpel prefers to lose a day’s wages rather than sin against God and neighbor, a decision he is capable of only because, in his worldview, the worldview of a true Israelite, God is a presence and not an idea.  The “felt life” Singer communicates is that of a people for whom God is everything.  (Witness Abba the shoemaker who, when his first son leaves for America and doesn’t write, fears the worst:  not that he is dead, or has lost his fortune, but that he has left the path of righteousness.)  As in the Old Testament, the God of these people, a people upon whom we Christians have been grafted by virtue of our Baptism, is not One who has been filtered down through centuries of rationalism, but rather One to whom we speak personally and Who speaks back to us.
The heart’s ultimate questions, which throughout his life Fr. Giussani pointed out could not be addressed by Christianity if Christianity were an idea, a discourse, and not a life, are something dramatized in Gimpel, Singer’s Fool, who from within a life of abuse and deceit, is helped, through his “yes” to that Presence, to keep his heart alive no matter how wounded; who knows that what he suffers is a mere shadow in light of the truer world his heart is made for–the world we Christians have met definitively when Gimpel’s God became flesh; the God whom we, as terribly modern Christians, professing to be believers yet succumbing all too easily to the rationalistic and positivistic reduction of our hearts in the modern world, could learn much of in the texture of felt life that conveys reality to us more truthfully than historical documents, because it conveys the ultimate texture of things that lies within it–a texture that has been readily bequeathed to us by our elder brethren in the Covenant.