Let loose the dogs, Yiddish style

Yes! Yes! It’s the latest installment in what is fast proving to be my new favorite contact sport: the gloriously nasty infighting amongst Yiddish intelligentsia. Because lord knows they do it oh so well. The latest round? The fact that Isaac Bashevis Singer’s centenary is nearly upon us, with a whole host of celebrations (including a 3-part volume that some lucky folks get to read early for one reason or another) in store. And some folks really, really don’t like it at all:

“I profoundly despise him,” said [Inna] Grade, the 75-year-old widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade. “I am very sorry that America is celebrating the blasphemous buffoon.”

At even the slightest mention of Singer’s name — which she will not allow herself to pronounce — Mrs. Grade (pronounced GRA-duh) becomes virtually unhinged.

“I despise him especially because he is dragging the Jewish literature, Judaism, American literature, American culture back to the land of Moab,” she said, referring to the biblical region where Lot and his daughters began an incestuous affair. “I profoundly despise all those who eat the bread into which the blasphemous buffoon has urinated.”

Essentially, the problem some Yiddishists have with Singer is that “the notion of evoking the world of the shtetl in a language other than Yiddish was both an absurdity and a betrayal.” Cultural appropriation, if you will:

“When Abraham Sutzkever was starving, fighting Nazis with the partisans in the Lithuanian woods and writing great Yiddish poetry about the tragic fate of the Jews on fragments of bark, Singer was eating cheese blintzes at Famous Dairy Restaurant on 72nd Street and thinking about Polish whores and Yiddish devils,” said Allan Nadler, director of Jewish Studies at Drew University and former director of research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Ah, I knew this couldn’t pass unnoticed by the boys from YIVO, who all too often are stuck in retrograde when it comes to modern culture and such.

Anyway, as much as people are pissed off and ready to revive old grudges, others wish for moderation:

“The centennial of Singer is a time to celebrate his achievement rather than to describe who was `eclipsed’ by his fame,” said Ruth Wisse*, the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard. “There was more to Singer than was recognized by some of his early readers, and he will continue to be rediscovered, layer by layer.”

And that, of course, is the crux of the centenary and the Singer omnibus. As someone who, alas, is unfamiliar with much of Singer’s work (yes to “Gimpel the Fool”, ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY and some of his books for children, no to pretty much everything else) I’m looking forward to such a rediscovery.

But others, of course, are much happier to sit in a corner and fight with each other.

*Full disclosure, because I feel like it: Ruth Wisse is the sister of my mother’s oldest friend. I don’t know Professor Wisse, but an essay she wrote for Commentary, “Philip Roth Then and Now” was a profound influence some years ago. So it’s cool to see her quoted and stuff.