AT 80, ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER STILL ENTERTAINS AND INSTRUCTS

Author: By Richard Higgins, Globe Staff
Date: Friday, November 9, 1984
Page: 2
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN


Isaac Bashevis Singer went to Harvard this week and served up his favorite literary dish, Spinoza with an icing of Yiddish humor.

The Polish-born Nobel laureate, who turned 80 in July, seems to have lost none of his mischievous mix of playfulness and high purpose. Speaking before an enthralled audience in Sanders Theatre Monday, he alternated humorous asides about goblins and imps with references to Emmanuel Kant's theory of causality and Spinoza's notion of free will.


And he offered some undisguised moralism, even if he claimed only to be quoting a certain rabbi of Lublin no longer around to defend himself.
"You are what you act," Singer said, summing up a story of his about an ill-tempered father-in-law who learns that the first step to becoming a better person is not intention but action. "The Almighty does not require good intentions. Deeds are what counts . . . . If you are in despair, act as though you believed. Faith will come afterward."

During what was billed as an "Evening with I. B. Singer," the pink- cheeked author read two of his stories, one of them an uproarious, and unpublished, tale about strange doings in a Yiddish newspaper composing room. He also talked about the Talmud, discussed the dybbuks (a kind of demon) responsible for the periodic disappearances of his manuscripts and fountain pens, panned the movie version of his story "Yentl," asserted that the leading cause of death among Yiddish writers was typographical errors and politely but sternly lectured about the need to give one's free will a workout.

"Don't listen so much to your emotions," he said, speaking at one point in Yiddish, then translating. "Listen to what you should do and not do. Modern man really thinks his emotions are the highest authority. If he feels something, he must immediately do it. The older people knew that free will is higher than emotions and is expressed best in deeds."

Singer played the role of the story-telling teacher during most of his two- hour appearance, echoing some of the serious philosophical themes woven through his prodigious output of stories, children's books, novels, plays, scholarly works and humorous sketches.

But there flashes of his fabled impishness, as when he mocked the tendency of writers, himself included, to attribute their own thoughts to the dead. ''When the resurrection of the dead" comes at the world's end, he said, ''there will be great joy. But all the writers of historical novels will have to commit suicide because all these rising corpses will look at their works and say it wasn't so."

Afterward, when autograph-seekers brought forth his books to be signed, one young man sheepishly opened before him "The Trial," by Franz Kafka, saying it was the only book he had. Smiling, Singer scribbled "as if I were Kafka."

The son and grandson of rabbis, Singer emigrated to America in 1935. He still lives modestly on West 86th street in Manhattan and still writes stories for a Yiddish-language newspaper, The Jewish Forward, using the same Remington portable with Yiddish characters he bought upon his arrival in New York. It is, he has said, a "smart" typewriter that won't let him type a false story.
From it has flowed a remarkable stream of works depicting the world of the Polish ghetto in which he grew up, its folklore and fantasies, its religious dilemmas and romantic entanglements. Among his better known works are "The Spinoza of Market Street," "The Magician of Lublin, "The Slave," ''Passions, "Shosha" and "Lost in America." That opus was honored by virtually every literary prize. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

Singer went to Cambridge this week at the invitation of the Harvard- Radcliffe Hillel and was introduced by Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, at whose house he stayed. Singer noted that, over breakfast, he and the rabbi had discussed the Talmud, the Jewish holy book of laws and commentary, sometimes quoting Scriptures passages from memory. "In this respect, we are the same," he said. After a pause, he added to laughter, "In other respects, he's the better man."

Seated at a small wooden table, a herringbone overcoat draped on his shoulders to ward off a stage chill, Singer first read an unpublished work, ''The Missing Line." A purported dialogue between two unemployed proofreaders, it tells of a line of type containing a metaphysical term that mysteriously vanishes from a column in a high-brow Yiddish newspaper, only to appear in a news story about a rape in the paper's low-brow competition. The infuriated columnist, Dr. Joshua Gottlieb, suspects the supernatural at work, only to learn of a highly unlikely, but real, chain of human events led to the mix-up. The laws of nature, he said, "are valid whether we like them or not."

"To me," Singer said in a reflective moment, his voice still carrying the accents of his native tongue, "the most wonderful miracle is what Spinoza called the natural order of things. To me, causality is more than a category of pure reason; It is the essence of creation."

The second story, "A Piece of Advice," centered on an ill-tempered father-in-law who turned into a loving and wise old man by learning that evil cannot be conquered by mere wishing.

" 'What should a Jew do if he is not a pious man?' the rabbi asked," Singer said. "Let him play the pious man . . . . It is what you do that matters. Are you angry, perhaps? Go ahead and be angry. But speak gentle words and be friendly at the same time. For whose sake are you pretending to be something you are not? For others, for our heavenly father."

Singer then took questions from the audience, enduring with grace the same questions he has been asked a hundred times: what his favorite books were ("the great 19th century novels, Dostoyevsky and the others"); why he wrote in Yiddish ("I always tell people to write about the things and the people they know best; I'd rather stay in my native language and environment"); and does he believe in goblins (only when he misplaces his eyeglasses).

He also disclosed why children are the best readers. Adults, he said, judge a work in light of what the critics say, whereas children read with their own eyes. "If you don't like a book, throw it down on the floor."

One woman asked if he still studied the Torah and Talmud, and Singer, whose fiction sparkles with all manner of sinners of the flesh and doubters of their faith, turned serious:

"Let me tell you, dear lady, I still consider these books the most wonderful books I've ever read. Although I've read other books and admire them, too, the Bible, the Talmud, the Torah, I admire even more so. They not only tell me a story but really tell me how to live and how to behave. I don't read all of them, but at least I know someone worries about me and about my soul. I look into them whenever I ever have a chance."

"Sometimes it's hard to listen to stories read, but he was delightful, wonderful," said Caryn Broitman, 23, a 1984 Harvard graduate in the audience. ''I liked the way he brings out different things about Jewish tradition in a story-telling way. I feel lucky that someone can express my culture in that kind of art. He makes me feel closer to the world he was from."