Vision from the Warsaw ghetto

Press, 26 May 1979, Page 17

Vision from the Warsaw ghetto

Shosha. By Isaac Bashevis Singer. Jonathan Cape, 1979. 377 pp. $11.95. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) In 1978 the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to a writer who constructed his own particular philosophy and communicated this quietly over a lifetime. The present novel clearly demonstrates why this 75-year-old Pole, who writes in Yiddish and has been living in the United States since 1935 writing about a Poland that no longer exists, was selected. Singer’s world is the ghetto of Warsaw in which he spent his childhood. It was smashed and mutilated by the Germans during the Second World War with mute compliance by the traditionally antiSemitic Poles. The story, however, is not the dramatic one of the Jews’ final uprising against the armoured arrogance of the Nazis. It is the story of the people who, at the turn of the century, teemed in a few square m les of city within a city, eternally conscious of the threat of persecution outside, but developing a culture of music, literature and philosophy to make it one of the centres of thinking in its day. Through the streets move the beggars singing of anarchists throwing bombs, magicians swallowing fire, and girls in velvet breeches with silver sequins shaking tambourines. Alongside was the constant stink of overflowing sewers and the decay of

repair work neglected. The narrator, Aaron, is a young man, sophisticated and on the verge of success in a literary career. He meets his childhood playmate. Shosha, who 20 years later is still a child physically and mentally having had some sort of encephalitic brain infection. To him, she represents the magic of stopping the advance of time.

Haunted by her visions of demons am the dead, Aaron sees as his last worl the protection of Shosha agarnst thi world, in spite of an opportunity to g< to America with a wealthy actress whe who promises him all the glitter of success.

The timing of the "romance" anc marriage is the verge of the Secont World War which Singer compares tt waiting for the Second Coming anc the destruction of the world. Each day is lived as a gift from God knowing full well that the ghetto’s inhabitant; will be killed as soon as the German; invade.

Singer is the last of the Yiddisl writers, a mixture of German, Polish Hebrew and other dialects, anc probably the greatest in this idiom His characters quietly develop withou the author intruding into theii thinking. The final apocalypse of ga; chambers enveloping such conscious teeming life has all the more impact for the fact that it is never described The mentally defective, stunted anc haunted Shosha, who becomes thi gifted writer’s wife, is the focus of at innocence in which destructive force: are battling. For those who havi formerly been absorbed in Singer universals in a “Stedtl” — the smal Jewish settlement — there, is no noe< to further recommend this book o human understanding on a yellowiuj and slightly musty cameo. As ar introduction to the writer, in spite o his ageing, it is as good as anythin) he has produced previously.