I want to start today by putting you in a very
specific and I think very uncomfortable pair
of shoes. Imagine for a second, it is 1935. Okay.
You are standing on the docks of New York City.
You're about 30 years old. And behind you, across
the entire ocean, the shadow of Nazi Germany
is just swallowing Europe. And you've left everyone.
Everyone. You have left your wife, your child,
your mother. Absolutely everyone you know is
back there. And you've got nothing in your pockets.
Basically nothing. No money, no real connections.
And here is the real kicker. You know exactly
three words of the English language. Take a chair.
That's it. Take a chair. It's so absurd. It's
not hello. It's not where's the bathroom. Not
even I'm hungry. Nothing useful. Just take a
chair. And yet this man who arise feeling like
a ghost writing in a language that the entire
world was screaming was dead or dying. Yiddish.
Yiddish. He didn't just survive. He didn't just
scrape by. He he conquered the absolute pinnacle
of the literary world. It's genuinely one of
the most unlikely success stories. in the history
of art, really. We're talking about a man who
became the only American Nobel laureate in literature
to have written primarily in a language other
than English. We are talking, of course, about
Isaac Bashevis Singer. And the more I read about
him for this deep dive, the more I realized he
is just this walking paradox. I mean, just think
about the content for a second. He wrote about
shtetls, these tiny, muddy, poverty stricken
Jewish market towns in Eastern Europe that that
literally do not exist anymore. They're gone.
Wiped out. He wrote about demons, possession,
rabbis, ritual slaughters, you know, ancient
superstitions. And yet somehow by the 1960s and
70s, he's a massive celebrity in modern secular
rock and roll America. Yes. He's getting published
in Playboy magazine right next to the centerfolds.
He's in The New Yorker alongside John Updike
and John Sheehy. Which is just, it's a bizarre
image. That is the part that just blows my mind.
You have this guy who looks like a confused grandfather.
How does that even happen? Well, that's the question,
isn't it? I think the mistake people make is
thinking that Singer became famous by adapting
to America. He didn't. Right. He didn't try to
write the great American novel. Not at all. He
became famous by diving so deep into his own
specific vanished world that he hit something
universal. He basically drilled down into the
folklore of Poland and somehow found the modern
condition of loneliness. And he did it with a
style that I don't think people expect if they
haven't read him. I think there's this this fiddler
on the roof vibe associated with Yiddish literature.
For sure. The sentimental tradition. Yeah, exactly.
Cute, heartwarming. But Singer, his stuff is
wild. It's full of sex. It's full of legitimate
horror. deep moral ambiguity and people doing
really terrible things to each other. Oh, absolutely.
Forget Fiddler on the Roof. Singer is more like
Dostoevsky meeting the Brothers Grimm in a dark
alley. Laughs. That's a great way to put it.
He wrote about a world where God is silent, but
the demons are very, very loud. So that's our
mission today. We are going to try and figure
out how Isaac Bashevis, singer -born ice curse
zinger, went from being a rabbinical seminary
dropout in Poland to a Nobel Prize winner in
Florida. And we have to unpack his whole idea
of private mysticism. His extremely controversial
views on vegetarianism. Oh, we're definitely
getting to that. And his complex, often really
angry relationship with God. And we have to talk
about the brother. You cannot understand Isaac
without understanding the shadow of his brother.
Absolutely. We will definitely get to the brother.
But let's start at the very beginning, the origin
story. Because Singer always said he grew up
in the kitchen of literature. He did. He was
born in Poland in a village called Leonsin. Now,
the date itself is a bit of a moving target.
He usually told people he was born on July 14,
1904. But that wasn't true. Probably not. Most
biographers and historical evidence, you know,
they point to November 11, 1903. So why lie about
it? The theory. and it's a pretty strong one,
is that he fudged the date later in his youth
to make himself appear younger to avoid the military
draft. If you were a certain age, you got pulled
into the army, and for a young Jewish boy in
Poland at that time, that could be a death sentence.
So yeah, 1903 is likely the real year. But regardless
of the exact date, the atmosphere in that house,
and it just defined... everything he ever wrote.
It really feels like he was living in a house
divided against itself. That is the perfect way
to describe it. To understand his writing, you
just have to look at his parents. On one side,
you have his father, Pinchas Mendel. He was a
Hasidic rabbi. Yes. And when we say Hasidic,
we mean this is intense mystical piety. His father
lived almost entirely in the spiritual world.
He believed in miracles. He believed that if
you prayed hard enough, God would literally provide
your daily bread. He wasn't interested in money
or worldly news. None of it. He was a man of
faith, pure and simple. And then you have the
mother, Beshav. Right. Beshav or Sheba. And she
came from the same world. She was the daughter
of a rabbi. But her personality was the polar
opposite. She was rational. She was intellectual.
She was deeply skeptical. So while the father
was praying for a miracle, the mother was looking
at the empty cupboard and asking, OK, but how
are we actually going to eat? She was the realist,
the anchor to the physical world. And Isaac takes
his pen name from her, Beshevis. It literally
means son of Beshev. It does. And you have to
pause and think about how significant that is.
In the traditional Jewish society of that time,
everything is patrilineal. You are Isaac, son
of Pinchas Mendel. Right. But he chooses, publicly,
to identify himself by his mother. Why do you
think he did that? Was it a kind of proto -feminist
statement or was it just that he felt closer
to her skepticism? I think it was a deep acknowledgement
that his artistic soul came from her. His father
gave him the subject matter, the demons, the
faith, the Torah, all the folklore. The raw material.
Exactly. But his mother gave him the perspective,
the critical eye, the ability to stand back and
question all of it. His writing is really just
a battlefield where his father's mysticism is
constantly at war with his mother's skepticism.
And he never resolved that war. He just wrote
it down for 50 years. And this war wasn't just
theoretical. It played out in their living room.
In 1908, the family moves to Warsaw, to Crookmona
Street. Now, I looked up descriptions of Crookmalna
Street in the early 20th century. It wasn't exactly
Park Avenue. No, no. It was the heart of the
Jewish slums. It was loud. It probably smelled
of boiled cabbage and unwashed bodies. It was
incredibly crowded. But for a young writer. It
was a gold mine. Absolute gold. Yeah. Because
his father wasn't just a rabbi who led prayers
in a synagogue. He was a Dayan. Right. An unofficial
judge. Right. What does that mean exactly? He
means that in these communities, people. Didn't
go to the Polish police or the secular courts
if they could avoid it. It was alien, often anti
-Semitic. They came to the rabbi. So the singer
apartment at number 10 Croke Monastery became
a courtroom. And little Isaac is just the fly
on the wall. He's hiding under the table or listening
from the next room. And just imagine what he
heard. It wasn't just dry theology. It was messy,
raw human drama. Right. A woman comes in claiming
her husband is sleeping with a maid. A merchant
claims his partner cheated him out of a bolt
of cloth. A mother is weeping because her daughter
wants to run off with a socialist, a revolutionary.
This is the raw material for his memoir, In My
Father's Court. Yes, and what he saw there, day
in and day out, was the collision of the holy
and the profane. He saw his father trying to
apply these ancient, rigid black and white laws
of the Torah to the messy, dirty, chaotic, gray
lives of people on the street. He learned early
on that human nature doesn't fit neatly into
religious boxes. Not even close. But then the
outside world breaks in. World War I starts.
And that stability, even in poverty, it just
shatters. The family gets split up. This was
a time of real hardship, of starvation in Warsaw.
Terrible. So to survive, Isaac's mother took
him and his younger brother to her hometown,
a place called Bia Garage. And this becomes the
second crucial location in his mental map. And
how was Bia Garage different from Warsaw? Well,
Warsaw was a city. It had newspapers, political
parties. You know, modernity was creeping in
at the edges. Bia Garage was a true shtetl. It
was like stepping back into the Middle Ages.
So less politics and more. folklore much more.
It was a place of timeless tradition, of deep,
deep superstition. This is where he soaked up
the stories of imps hiding in the cellar, or
debugs possessing brides on their wedding day.
He realized that the old world wasn't just a
physical place, it was a mindset. So in Warsaw,
he sees the modern Jewish struggle. In B -Garage,
he sees the ancient Jewish soul. Precisely. And
he lived there for several very formative years.
So because he had lived in both the city and
the village, he could write about both. He could
write a story about a cynical intellectual in
a Warsaw cafe, and the next day write a story
about a demon in a 17th century hamlet. He had
both worlds inside him. Okay, so he has the setting.
He has the central conflict from his parents.
But we have to talk about the catalyst. We cannot
tell Isaac's story without talking about Israel
Joshua Singer. We really can't. You can't. Israel
Joshua was his older brother by about 10 years.
And in the Singer household, Israel Joshua was,
well, he was a supernova. So paint that picture
for us, because Isaac, by all accounts, is this
shy, redheaded, skinny kid. Who is Israel Joshua?
Israel Joshua was tall, handsome, supremely confident,
and a complete rebel. He was the first one to
look at their father's intensely religious world
and just say, no thank you. He broke away. Completely.
He cut off his side locks. He put on modern clothes.
He became a secular writer. And not just any
writer. He became famous. A big deal in the Yiddish
literary scene. So Isaac is watching his big
brother become a kind of walk star. Exactly.
Isaac worshipped him. He was his mentor, his
idol. But can you imagine the pressure? You want
to be a writer, but the position of the writer
in the family is already taken by this larger
-than -life figure. And Isaac, he didn't exactly
launch with the same kind of success. No, not
at all. In fact, Isaac spent his early 20s feeling
like an absolute failure. He tried to please
his father by enrolling in the Touched Kimoni
Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw. How did that go?
Disastrously. He hated it. He hated the food.
He hated the rigid schedule. He hated what he
saw as the hypocrisy there. He dropped out pretty
quickly. Okay, so plan B? Plan B was trying to
make a living giving Hebrew lessons. He wasn't
good at it. He was poor. He was terribly shy,
socially awkward. He described himself during
this period as essentially a ghost just drifting
through life. So how does he get from drifting
ghost to published author? The brother again.
It's a classic nepotism hire. In 1923, Israel
Joshua gets Isaac a job as a proofreader for
a literary magazine in Warsaw called Literarisch
Blader. A proofreader. It's not glamorous, but
it is a foot in the door. It was the kitchen
of literature he needed. He was correcting other
people's grammar, sure, but he was also meeting
all the important writers. He was listening to
the debates. He was soaking it all in. And secretly,
he was working on his own stuff. And eventually,
he starts publishing. He wins a literary competition
in 1925 for a story. And then he starts working
on his first novel, Satan and Gorey. This comes
out in 1933. I want to dig into this book because
I feel like the title, Alone Satan and Gorey,
tells you this isn't going to be a nice, heartwarming
story. And the year, 1933, is so significant.
Hitler is rising in Germany. The context is everything.
The novel is set in the 17th century, specifically
the year 1666. But to understand it, you have
to know what happened 18 years earlier, in 1648.
The Chmielnicki uprisings. What was that? It
was a genocide. Cossacks swept through Eastern
Europe and slaughtered tens of thousands, maybe
hundreds of thousands of Jews. It completely
destroyed the structure of Jewish life. It left
the survivors traumatized, broken, and desperate
for an answer. So the entire community is in
a state of collective PTSD. Massive PTSD. And
into that void, into that desperation, steps
a rumor. The Messiah has come, a man named Sabbatai
Zivi. He promises that all the suffering is over,
that they will be transported to the Holy Land
on clouds. And the town of Garay in the novel
goes crazy for this. They lose their minds, and
this is what Singer describes so masterfully.
The community stops following the traditional
laws. They engage in these hysterical, ecstatic
rituals. They start breaking the rules of Judaism
because they believe the end of days is here,
so the old rules no longer apply. So it descends
into chaos. A frenzy of sexual license, bizarre
mysticism, and even cruelty. And the parallel
to 1933 is just chilling. It's undeniable. Singer
is writing this as he watches the rise of Nazism
and you could also argue the rise of communism,
these massive totalitarian ideologies that promised
a new world but were delivering terror. He's
showing how a traumatized society can so easily
slide into collective insanity. Exactly. He's
saying, look at us. We are doing it again. We
are looking for a false messiah to save us. It's
a terrifyingly mature book for a young writer.
It is. And it was a signal that he wasn't just
a storyteller. He was a philosopher of history.
Even with that success, he knew he was trapped.
Israel Joshua had already seen the writing on
the wall and moved to New York. He kept telling
Isaac, you have to come. The threat was real
and growing every day. And this brings us to
the escape in 1935. And I want to pause here
because this isn't a clean Hollywood break. He
didn't load up the station wagon with the whole
family. Yeah, this is the dark stain on the biography
for many people. Isaac had a partner at the time,
Runia, and they had a five -year -old son, Israel.
zamir but he didn't take them with him why not
was it money was it a lack of visas or did he
just not want them it's complicated and the sources
are a bit contradictory their relationship was
already falling apart Runia was a fervent communist,
and Isaac, as we just discussed, was deeply skeptical
of all ideologies. So they were politically opposed.
Fundamentally. She wanted to go to the Soviet
Union, which she saw as the promised land of
communism. He wanted to go to America. So they
split. She took the boy to Moscow. He got on
a boat to New York. And he wouldn't see his son
again for 20 years. Correct. And his son, Israel
Zamir, later wrote a very powerful memoir about
this called Journey to My Father. It was a wound
that never fully healed for either of them. Isaac
carried a tremendous amount of guilt about it.
But he also, he compartmentalized it. He got
on that boat alone. So he lands in New York,
take a chair, and we enter the lost in America
phase. I think we assume that because he had
a successful brother there, he was fine. But
he wasn't, was he? He was miserable. You have
to understand the psychological state he was
in. He's in New York, a city that runs on English.
He's a writer who can only write in Yiddish.
And everywhere he looks, the children of Jewish
immigrants are assimilating. They're learning
English. They're becoming American. Right. He
looks at his own language, the very tool of his
art, and he sees a corpse. He literally thought
he was writing for nobody. He had a massive writer's
block. For roughly five or six years, he barely
wrote anything of value. He was depressed, he
was anxious, and he was financially dependent
on his brother, which he must have hated. So
what pulls him out of that hole? What changes?
Two things happen. One is romantic, and one is
tragic. The romantic one is that he meets Elma
Wasserman in 1938. And she was very different
from Runia. Totally different. She was a German
-Jewish refugee, very middle class, very assimilated.
She didn't even speak Yiddish. But they fell
in love, got married in 1940, and she became
his anchor. She organized his life. She believed
in him. She gave him stability. And the tragedy.
1944. Israel Joshua Singer dies suddenly of heart
attack. He was only 50 years old. Wow. That must
have been devastating. That was his rock. It
was earth -shattering. Isaac was suddenly alone
in the world, artistically speaking. But strangely,
it was the shock he needed. With his brother
gone, Isaac felt this sudden, desperate responsibility.
The torch had been passed. He had to carry it.
He had to become the writer. And that is when
he starts writing The Family Mascot. Yes. And
The Family Mascot was his declaration of independence.
It was this sprawling family saga serialized
in the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. And right
out of the gate, he showed he wasn't going to
play nice. I read about the controversy with
that serial. The editor was not happy. Oh, he
was furious. It wasn't just one thing. There's
a famous scene where the protagonist engages
in adultery, double adultery, actually on the
night of Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, the Day of
Atonement. The holiest night of the Jewish calendar.
You're supposed to be fasting and praying for
your life, and his characters are sinning. That's
provocative. The editor of the foreword, Abraham
Kinnan, wanted to stop printing it. He said,
this is filth. This is an insult to our readers.
But the readers disagreed. The readers couldn't
stop reading. The paper circulation actually
went up. They were demanding the next installment.
It was scandalous. It was shocking. But it was
real. It spoke to the secret transgressions that
everyone knew existed but no one ever talked
about. That was the moment Isaac Bashevis Singer
truly arrived. He wasn't just the brother of
Israel Joshua anymore. He was a force of nature.
But he is still trapped in Yiddish. The foreword
is a Yiddish newspaper. How does he cross that
bridge? into the english -speaking world because
that is the technical leap that makes him a nobel
prize winner this is a fascinating part of his
process he realized that if his work was going
to live on it had to be read in english but his
own spoken english was always heavily accented
and his written english was never perfect so
he developed a system what was it he treated
translation not as a simple conversion of words
but as a recreation what does that mean in practice
well he would hire translator usually a young
woman, often an aspiring writer herself. They
would sit together in his living room. He would
hold the original Yiddish text, and he would
read it out loud to her in his own rough, literal
English. Something like, he walked into the room,
he felt sad. Okay, very basic. And she would
polish it. She would say, maybe melancholy is
a better word here, or let's structure the sentence
this way for better flow. But as they worked,
Singer would change the story on the fly. He'd
edit it again. He'd realize, you know, this long
paragraph about Jewish law. An American reader
isn't going to get it. Let's cut it. Or I need
to explain this superstition more clearly. So
the English version was actually a different
draft of the book, a new version. Exactly. He
called it a second original. The English versions
are often tighter, leaner, and sometimes even
clearer than the Yiddish originals. And here's
the key. Once that English version existed, that
became the source text for the French translation,
the German translation, the Japanese translation.
So if I buy a Singer book in Paris today, I'm
actually reading a translation of the English
translation of the Yiddish. Precisely. He used
English as the gateway to the rest of the world.
And the story that kicked that door wide open
was Gimple the Fool. 1953. This is the big bang
moment for him in America. So tell us the story
of Dimple, because the title sounds like it could
be a comedy, but it's really not. No, it's a
tragedy that feels like a folktale. Gimple is
the town baker in a small shtetl. And he's called
a fool because he believes absolutely everything
anyone tells him. Anything. If the villagers
tell him the Messiah is coming tonight, he puts
on his best clothes and waits by the road. If
they tell him his parents have risen from the
dead, he runs to the cemetery to greet them.
And the town just mocks him for it. They prank
him constantly. Relentlessly. They decide to
marry him off to the town tramp, a woman named
Elka. She is pregnant when they get married,
and Gimbel knows it's not his child, but she
convinces him it was just a premature birth four
months after the wedding. That's a hard sell
even for Gimple. But he accepts it. Yeah. He
catches her with other men, and she always talks
her way out of it. He chooses to believe her.
And as you're reading, you're just sitting there
thinking, you idiot. Stand up for yourself. See
what's right in front of your eyes. There's a
turn. There is. As the story goes on, you start
to realize something profound. Gimple isn't stupid.
He knows. He's not an idiot. But he has made
a conscious choice that it is better to be a
fool than to be a cynic. He says, essentially,
I will believe because to not believe is to live
in a world without trust, a world worse than
this one. Wow. So his gullibility is actually
a form of holiness, a spiritual discipline. Exactly.
And this story, this little Yiddish folktale
lands on the desk of Saul Bellow. Saul Bellow,
future Nobel Prize winner himself, an absolute
giant of American literature. Bellow reads the
story in Yiddish and is just. blown away by it.
He translates it himself. It gets published in
the Partisan Review, which was the Bible of the
New York intellectual scene at the time. So he
gets the ultimate stamp of approval. Overnight,
everyone is asking, who is this Isaac Bashevis
singer guy? When you have Saul Bellow translating
you, you are not an ethnic writer anymore. You
are literature with a capital L. So now he's
famous. And he starts pouring out these stories.
And we need to talk about the content again because
it just pushes so many boundaries. He writes
about things that the Jewish community in the
50s and 60s wasn't exactly broadcasting. He was
fundamentally anti -nostalgia. He hated the idea
that because the shtetl was destroyed by the
Nazis, it had to be remembered as some kind of
paradise of saints. He said, no, we were human.
We had pimples, we had lusts, we were petty,
and we were noble. Give us some examples of the
taboo stuff he was writing about. Well, take
Yentl the Yeshiva Boy. It's about a young woman
who cross -dresses as a man so she can be allowed
to study the Torah. That's a direct challenge
to traditional gender roles. And that was written
when? In the early 60s, way ahead of its time.
Or a story called Zytel and Rickle, which deals
with what is clearly a lesbian relationship,
though he wouldn't use that modern term. He frames
it through the lens of demonic possession and
spirits, but the underlying sexuality is unmistakable.
And then there's the really demonic stuff, Zeidlis
the Pope. That's a wild one. It's about a brilliant
Jewish scholar, a Talmudic genius, who is so
arrogant, so obsessed with his own intellect,
that the devil comes to tempt him. And what's
the temptation? The devil says, you are too smart
for these Jews. Your mind is wasted here. You
should be the pope. And the man actually converts
to Catholicism and becomes the pope, not out
of faith, but out of pure intellectual vanity.
It's a story about how intellect without humility
leads to destruction. This connects to his whole
idea of private mysticism. Because you read these
stories and you have to wonder, did Singer actually
believe in demons? Or were they just metaphors
for the evil in human nature? That's the million
dollar question, isn't it? He was asked this
constantly in interviews. And his answer was
always brilliantly elusive. He would say, I believe
in them as literary entities, but then he'd get
a twinkle in his eye and say, but I don't know
that they don't exist. He was playing with us.
A little bit. But his private mysticism was a
real philosophy for him. He wasn't an Orthodox
Jew in practice. He didn't really keep kosher.
He didn't go to synagogue regularly. But he was
certainly not an atheist. So what did he believe?
He believed the universe was teeming with forces
we don't understand. He felt that God was real,
but that God was hidden. Distant. And silent.
And silent. And this brings us to the shadow
of the Holocaust. Singer didn't often write about
the concentration camps directly. He felt he
couldn't do it justice, that it was beyond art.
But the Holocaust is the background radiation
of everything he wrote after 1945. And it made
him angry at God. He has that famous quote, I
am angry at God because of what happened to my
brothers. Yes, his younger brother Moshe. died
somewhere in the Soviet Union. His mother died
there too. The entire world he grew up in was
incinerated. So his theology became a theology
of protest. He's saying, God, you created a world
where the innocents are slaughtered. I will acknowledge
that you exist, but I don't have to like you.
I don't have to approve. This anger at the slaughter
of the innocent, it leads us directly to the
most controversial aspect of his personal philosophy,
vegetarianism. This is huge. For the last 35
years of his life, Singer would not touch meat.
At all. And this wasn't for health reasons. He
wasn't trying to lower his cholesterol or anything
like that. No. He had that famous line, I did
it for the health of the chickens. Yeah. But
it goes so much deeper than just a witty one
-liner. For him, it was a profound moral and
theological position. He saw a direct line between
the violence humans inflict on animals and the
violence humans inflict on each other. There
is a quote from his story, The Letter Writer,
that just stops me cold every time I read it.
I want to read it here, but I have to warn you,
the listener, it is heavy. Go ahead. It's essential
to understanding him. He writes, in relation
to animals, all people are Nazis. For the animals,
it is an eternal Treblinka. Eternal Treblinka.
I mean, I don't even know how to process that.
He is explicitly comparing a chip and farm to
a death camp. And he is doing this as a Jewish
man who lost family to the Nazis. How did people
react to that when he said it? It was explosive.
Many, many people were deeply offended. They
felt it trivialized the unique horror of the
Holocaust. They said, how can you possibly compare
a human soul to a cow? It's an argument you still
hear today. Of course. But Singer stood his ground.
He argued that the mindset is the same. It is
the belief that might makes right. The belief
that because I am stronger than you and because
I have the power to kill you, I have the right
to do with your life as I please. So for him,
eating meat was accepting the fundamental logic
of the oppressor. Exactly. He asked a very uncomfortable
question. How can we humans pray to God for mercy
when we show absolutely no mercy to the creatures
in our power? He saw the slaughterhouse as the
ultimate proof that the world is a cruel place,
perhaps abandoned by a loving God. It's a consistent,
if terrifying, worldview. The strong crushed
the weak. The Nazis crushed the Jews. Humans
crushed the animals. And in his stories, The
demons crush the sinners. It's all part of the
same brutal cosmic hierarchy. Given how dark
and cynical that view is, it's all the more surprising
that he became such a pop culture figure. But
by the 1970s, he is everywhere. And then in 1978,
he gets the call. Stockholm Calling. The Nobel
Prize. It was the ultimate validation, not just
for him, but for the entire culture of Yiddish.
He gave his acceptance speech in both Yiddish
and English. He called Yiddish the language of
the frightened and the hopeful. It was a beautiful
historic moment. It put a stamp of eternity on
a language that Hitler and Stalin had tried to
wipe from the face of the earth. And naturally,
with the Nobel Prize comes Hollywood. Enter Barbra
Streisand. We have to talk about Yentl. 1983.
Barbra Streisand directs, produces, co -writes,
and stars in the film adaptation of Singer's
story, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy. It's a huge hit,
a classic. But Singer, he hated it. Hated is
an understatement. He loathed it. He wrote an
absolutely scathing review of it in the New York
Times. What was his beef? I mean, it's Barbra
Streisand. It brought his work to millions of
people. Well, first of all, she made it a musical.
Singer said, I did not write a story about a
singing yeshiva boy. He felt the songs trivialized
the intense, sacred act of spiritual study. But
more importantly, he felt she completely changed
the ending to be about modern women's lib rather
than what he saw as a spiritual tragedy. In the
movie, she goes off to America at the end, right?
Yeah. To be free and study on her own terms.
Right. It's a triumphant, empowering, American
immigrant ending. Papa, can you hear me? It's
all very uplifting. But in Singer's original
story, Yentl doesn't go to America. She wanders
off to another yeshiva to keep living the lie
because her soul is trapped. There's no place
in the world for a woman with a man's soul. So
it's a tragedy. A dark, complex tragedy. And
Singer felt Streisand turned it into a schmaltzy,
feel -good American success story. It goes back
to what we said at the start. He wasn't Fiddler
on the Roof. He did not want the happy ending.
Never. He wanted the truth, and the truth for
him is usually messy and unresolved. He had better
luck with some other adaptations, though. Enemies,
a love story. That's a fantastic film. Oh, Angelica
Houston is amazing in that. And that story, that
film, captures the singer vibe perfectly. It's
about a Holocaust survivor in New York who ends
up with three wives at the same time. It's a
comedy of errors, but a deeply sad one. Exactly.
It's funny, it's tragic, and it's about how trauma
destroys your ability to live a normal moral
life. It's pure Singer. And then there are the
children's books, which is another pivot I just
didn't see coming. Zlay to the Goat. It is strange,
isn't it? The man who writes about adultery and
demon popes also writes for kids. But he loved
writing for children. He had this great line.
Children don't read reviews. They don't give
a damn about the critics. They don't read to
find their identity. They read for the story.
If the story's boring, they just walk away. Exactly.
He respected that honesty. And Light of the Goat,
which was illustrated by the great Maurice Sendak,
is a masterpiece. It's about a boy and a goat
who get trapped in a haystack during a blizzard.
And they survive together. They save each other.
It's gentle. It's mystical. And it treats the
animal with the same soulfulness as the human.
It fits his vegetarian philosophy perfectly.
So we come to the final chapter. the 1980s he's
in his 80s now he's rich he's famous where is
he living what's his life like he's living in
surfside florida just north of miami beach it
is such a distinct image the old yiddish writer
in a cream -colored suit walking down collins
avenue under the palm trees he became a local
fixture he would sit in drugstores and eat lunch
he would walk along the beach and feed the pigeons
People would stop him and ask for autographs,
or sometimes they'd ask him to solve their personal
problems, just like they used to ask his father
on Crookmalma Street. The circle closes. In a
way. And he kept writing. Until the very end,
he was dictating stories, writing essays for
Moment magazine. But his health did fail him
eventually. He suffered a series of strokes.
And he lost his memory. Which, for a writer whose
entire career was based on the power of memory,
was the ultimate tragic cruelty. And he passed
away on July 24th, 1991. He was 87 years old.
He was buried in New Jersey in a Jewish cemetery,
not in Poland, not in Israel, but here in America.
So let's try to wrap this all up. We have talked
about the demons, the brother, the vegetarianism,
the Nobel Prize. When you step back and look
at the whole incredible picture, what is the
Singer paradox? The paradox is that he was a
man made of contradictions who never tried to
resolve them. He embraced them. He was a skeptic
who wrote constantly about faith. He was a modernist
who wrote about the past. He was a harsh realist
who wrote about ghosts and demons. He kept a
destroyed world alive. Exactly. The world of
the Polish Jews. He kept it alive, not by preserving
it in amber like a museum piece, but by animating
it with all its flaws and passions. He made them
breathe again. He made them breathe. He made
them sin. He made them weep. He made them question
God. He proved that the Jews of Poland weren't
just a statistic. They weren't just the six million
martyrs of the Holocaust. They were people. And
that, I think, is the greatest memorial you can
possibly build. And for the listener today, why
does this matter? Why should someone in 2026
pick up the collected stories of Isaac Bashevis'
sinner? Because Singer... addresses the modern
condition of loneliness like almost no one else
we live in a world where a lot of the old structures
are falling apart where god feels silent for
a lot of people where we are all trying to find
our own private mysticism to make sense of things.
Singer charts that territory. He tells you, yes,
the world is scary. Yes, we are alone. But look
at how miraculous and strange and terrifying
and beautiful it all is. And he proves that you
don't have to be broad to be universal. That
is the big takeaway for me. Singer once said
something like, the Jews of Poland had died,
but something, call it spirit or whatever, is
still somewhere in the universe. He focused on
one tiny, specific street in Warsaw, one vanished
culture. And by doing that, he spoke to the whole
world. I want to leave you with a thought on
that. We live in an era of globalization. Everything
is blending. TikTok trends go global in seconds.
We are often told as creators to make our stories
accessible to everyone. But Isaac Fashevis Singer
proves that the most specific, the most localized,
the most detailed stories are often the ones
that connect the deepest. Absolutely. If you
try to write for everyone, you often end up writing
for no one. If you write the truth about your
own Croque Malma Street, whatever that is for
you, you might just win a Nobel Prize. Maybe
we all need to stop looking outward for a moment
and go back to our own roots to find the real
truth. That's it for this deep dive into Isaac
B'Sheba Singer. Thank you for listening.