April is to me full of sad associations.
Last year, I was going through a difficult time. So I went through one Chekhov volume after another, in the translations by Ronald Wilks and Ann Dunnigan and Constance Garnett. Out of Constance Garnett’s 13 volumes, I read 8. At such a time, Chekhov brought me comfort and consolation. At such a time, I felt closer to Chekhov than any other prose writer, even more than Tolstoy and Jane Austen.
But now, somehow I’m not in the mood for Chekhov, for the pessimism and the unhappy people in his works. Perhaps it’s tiresome after a while to keep reading about people wasting their lives and losing their chances of happiness. Or perhaps it’s simply that Chekhov makes me more pessimistic, when Tolstoy or Shakespeare doesn’t have on me such an effect.
Is there something to Joseph Epstein’s idea about literature and faith in God?
Anyway, I’ve been reading Isaac Bashevis Singer. I realised at the end of 2023 that I hadn’t read many books by Jewish writers—how Jewish is Kafka? how Jewish is Proust?—so I’ve been reading Isaac Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Primo Levi and now, between the 2 parts of Don Quixote, am back to Singer’s Collected Stories. It’s odd—at the beginning of the book, 2-3 months ago, I thought he was very good but couldn’t help thinking “so what?”, intending to write a blog post examining the idea of relatability in literature—but now I’m thoroughly enjoying his stories.
Singer’s short stories, I guess, might be roughly divided into 2 groups: the Polish, folklore-like stories, full of devils and dybbuks (like “The Destruction of Kreshev”, “The Last Demon”, “Henne Fire”, “A Crown of Feathers”, etc.) and the American, more realistic stories, usually with a Yiddish writer as the narrator (like “A Friend of Kafka”, “A Day in Coney Island”, “The Cabalist of East Broadway”, “A Quotation from Klopstock”, “Old Love”, “The Yearning Heifer”, etc.). But the realistic New York-based stories can sometimes be filled with ghosts, like “The Cafeteria”, and sometimes a folkloric story may be built on a horrifying historical event, such as “The Last Demon” is, one gradually realises, about the Holocaust.
But what do I like about Isaac Bashevis Singer? He’s a fantastic storyteller. I love his rich imagination, his prose, his striking metaphors and imagery. I love his warmth and humour. I love the compassion he has for all his characters.
So I’m spending the cruellest month with Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Update on 29/7/2024: I am now reading Chekhov’s Volume 10 (Constance Garnett), and thought of Joseph Epstein’s idea: what nonsense! Chekhov is a great writer, and he gives me great solace that I do not get from religious writers. My literary heroes, now that I’ve thought about it, are Chekhov, Primo Levi, and Vasily Grossman, and the other two are not religious either.
