Brothers and Masters

By Stefan Kanfer

THE PENITENT

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 170 pages;

$13.95

THE BROTHERS SINGER by Clive Sinclair

Allison & Busby; 176 pages; $14.95

For most of this century, Isaac Bashevis Singer has spoken for a great and ancient minority: demons. In his fiction, they install themselves in mirrors to afflict women with vanity, render bridegrooms impotent on wedding nights, knock over Sabbath candles, spill poor men's dinners. "The demons," he says, "represent to me, in a sense, the ways of the world. Instead of saying this is the way things happen, I will say this is the way demons behave."

Evidently the imps are powerful enough to influence even a Nobel laureate. Hence the strange ambivalence of The Penitent. This "new" novel was first published in 1973. It exhibits Singer's narrative mastery, but none of his compassion; it offers only one character, Joseph Shapiro, and he is so acrimonious that in an afterword, Singer disavows his own creation: "While I was brought up among extremists who thought and felt like that angry man... I cannot agree with him."

Few can. Shapiro is afflicted with a temperament suited less to a religious zealot than to a retrograde cab driver. In Jerusalem, the bitter, aging monologuist recalls his days in America. There, "as in Sodom, the perpetrator went free and the witness rotted in jail. And all this was done in the name of liberalism." Argues Shapiro: "When a man sleeps with a modern woman, he actually gets into bed with all her lovers. That's why there are so many homosexuals today."

Shapiro's screed is occasionally diverted by memories of adulteries past ("Sin, too, requires time"), but his principal obsessions are the idols of contemporary society: novels, psychiatry, sociology, pornography, politics, and worldliness in general. In his view, humanity's chance for redemption lies in unquestioning faith. That alone can reconcile the hopes of humanity and the violence of history. Shapiro takes a circuitous route to arrive at Dante's dictum: "In his will is our peace."

As in the past, Singer fuses two styles: the fabulist confined to his shtetl and the modernist who regards the universe as a stark and enigmatic combat zone. If Joseph Shapiro is disagreeable, he is never less than credible; once again the author displays a talent for mimicry that has previously allowed him to imitate Satan, fools, saints and, on one occasion, a rooster. True, his gift has been squandered on a man with no redeeming features, but for once Singer is not out to charm his readers. He and his penitent seem content to prove the old Yiddish proverb "Going backward is still a form of travel."

In his double biography, The Brothers Singer, British Writer Clive Sinclair traces that journey back to Poland, where Singer was born in 1904. If a writer's capital is his childhood, Singer is a literary Rothschild, still retailing anecdotes he heard swirling through the streets of Bilgoray and Lublin. Many stories contain transsexual themes--oblique references to his mother and father; Isaac's older brother, Novelist Israel Joshua Singer (The Brothers Ashkenazi), called his parents' marriage "a tragedy, due to the fact that fate transposed genders in heaven." His father, a rabbi, was "soft," his wife was "sharp"; he was "more a creature of the heart than of intellect," she was "totally devoted to reason and logic."

That tension is apparent in the familial novels of Israel and the hypnotic fables of Isaac. The younger man's stories of supernatural powers arise from the days when he was a God-haunted youth alternately studying sacred works and trembling at the revelations of Dostoyevsky: "I suffered deep crises, was subject to hallucinations. My dreams were filled with demons, ghosts, devils, corpses." His fascination with the secular began with his brother's apostasy. Recalled Israel: "I could gather more from one person than from a thousand holy books. I fled from these books and slaked my thirst for life among ... the common people whose lives seemed so round and complete."

The older boy became a total skeptic, exaggerating his mother's tendencies; Isaac rebelled against rebellion, ransacking "the spiritual treasure trove" of religious belief. As Sinclair observes, Isaac the daydreamer "gloried in the aristocracy of his imagination." His sibling "observed the world as a political machine."

Poland and, eventually, Europe could not hold Israel. He fled to America, where he became one of the most outspoken of the early anti-Stalinist writers. A short while later, he sent for his brother, thus saving him from certain annihilation in the Holocaust. But he could not forestall tragedy. Early in 1944, Israel died of a heart attack in New York City. It was, his younger brother remembers, "the greatest misfortune of my entire life. He was my father, my teacher. I never really recovered from this blow."

Indeed, in The Penitent he still refers to Israel as "my late brother and master." Sinclair's luminous little volume is hardly the definitive study of the brothers Singer, but in its examination of sources it shows why Isaac has earned the title he once bestowed on another character: the magician of Lublin. Writing in Yiddish, using the demonic forces of art and recollection, he has kept his brother's memory alive, raised a ruined city, given the power of speech to a vanished people and revived an ailing language. Is it any wonder that at the age of 79, he still believes in miracles?

--By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.