Long-dead author Isaac Bashevis Singer wanted you to see these unearthed essays

Before he died, Nobel prizewinning author Isaac Bashevis Singer brought his son, Israel Zamir, into his “chaos room” — a walk-in closet packed with so much material that in the author’s words, he’d have to “live another 100 years” to see it all to print.

After Singer’s death, the contents of the chaos room — thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, along with photos and other documents — were transferred to the Harry Ransom Center archives at the University of Texas in Austin. Once there, after a lengthy cataloging process, few academics explored the unpublished material.

In 2014, author and literary scholar David Stromberg traveled to Austin in search of an unpublished essay by Singer referenced at the end of his novel “The Penitent.” As it turned out, when Stromberg stepped into the archives that day, he was entering the intimate world of the late Jewish author.

Born and raised in Poland before moving to New York City in 1935, Singer wrote in Yiddish, but worked to translate much of his writing into English — some of which he did himself — and he aspired to publish even more. At the archives, Stromberg expected to find Yiddish essays in need of translation, but to his surprise, he found a trove of material already in English. Singer’s presence was palpable on those pages, his penciled notes showing that what he hadn’t translated himself, he’d supervised closely.

Getting permission to edit the materials was far from simple. Stromberg twice made the pilgrimage — in 2013 and 2014 — from his Jerusalem home out to Kibbutz Beit Alfa to meet with the author’s son. It was in 2014, following his excursion to the archives, that Stromberg finally received Zamir’s blessing to collect and publish the author’s essays.

The result is “Old Truths and New Cliches,” a collection of 19 essays, most of them previously unpublished in English. In the book’s introduction, Stromberg points to a 1963 memo written by publisher Roger Straus, which says that Singer had plans to assemble a collection of English-language essays. The selection of translated works, Stromberg says, reflect Singer’s choices for that book.

Published on May 17 by Princeton University Press, “Old Truths and New Cliches” is the culmination of a decade’s work for Stromberg. Virtual book launches from Los Angeles and New York featured author Aimee Bender and acclaimed Yiddish scholar Agi Legutko.

In addition to translating and editing the works of Singer, Stromberg is himself the author of fiction, nonfiction, scholarly essays, and four collections of single-panel cartoons. His most recent release was the novella-length speculative essay, “A Short Inquiry Into the End of the World,” in 2021.

Stromberg was born in Israel to ex-Soviet parents, and moved to the United States as a child in 1989. He returned to Israel in 2008, where he worked in journalism and ultimately earned his PhD in literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Times of Israel spoke with Stromberg over the telephone from his home in Jerusalem the day after the book release. The following interview has been edited.

This book contains a lot of previously unpublished material, and your introduction says that it’s just a fraction of what Singer had lying around in a walk-in closet when he died. How is it that so much of this work is still unseen by the public?

There are a couple of answers to that. After Singer’s death, it probably took close to a decade to really finish the purchase, transfer, cataloging, preservation and ordering of the papers — you’re already talking about the mid-to-late ‘90s. So there’s already a kind of a break — anybody who’s interested in Bashevis Singer had to move on to other things until they had access to this material. It’s just the technical side of it. You could call it the rhythm of research, the rhythm of archival work. You could say there was just a loss of attention.

Wait, how much material was there?

Not just a couple of boxes — 176 boxes. It’s a lot of stuff to go through. So that’s one part of the story. The other part has to do with prejudice — for which Singer is slightly to blame. He developed this image as an old-fashioned storyteller, and so nobody was looking for other kinds of writing.

And then there’s the idea that he must have published all the things he thought were good, and that he must have left unpublished the things that maybe were less good, or that somebody else told him were less good. But that’s an approach that doesn’t take into account the contextual aspect of being a professional, world-class writer in real-time. Good as they may be, some things fall by the wayside. In this case, it was the essay collection.

The thing about archival work is that if you don’t have some sort of a hunch, a clue, as to what you’re looking for, then you don’t necessarily know it’s there. People don’t usually show up to an archive and say, “Okay, give me box one, give me box two. I’m just looking.”

So when you went in, did you have a sense that you’d be looking for English writings or writings that were meant to be translated into English?

I knew I was looking for essays. I was writing my doctorate on “The Penitent,” at the end of which in the author’s note Bashevis mentions an essay that wasn’t ever published. I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” One little moment like that — you say, “Hmm, I wonder what that refers to” — can lead to 10 years of research. And you have to grab onto those moments. Those are extremely important moments.

When I started, I didn’t know what was going to be in the archive. I thought that if I was going to do a collection of Singer’s essays, it would be a translation project — making a selection of his Yiddish essays, translating them into English and publishing them. But I still had to see what was in the archive. So I went to Austin and ordered every box or folder that looked like it might have an essay. Slowly, I saw that there was enough material already translated — and translated either by or with the direct supervision and revision of Singer himself.

You mentioned that there were handwritten notes by Singer on some of these.

Not just on some — everything has his markings on it. I relate to these as Singer translations. Even if other people may have helped him or did a first draft, he so thoroughly rewrites in English that, ultimately, he’s the one with the final authorial hand.

So I went in and found these translations, and I was kind of confused, because I thought, “Well, now what do I do?” So I started ordering the correspondence and looking box by box, folder by folder, at the letters he received to get some idea of his life. This, of course, ended up being extremely helpful because it gave me a conception of the writer in practice.

I not only saw the lectures, I also saw the letters from the colleges that invited him to come and give these lectures. I saw how much organization it took not only to translate these works and rewrite them and edit them, but to arrange the lectures, get on a plane or a bus, show up, get off the bus, walk into the auditorium, set down his briefcase, take the lecture out. You suddenly see everything as part of a living context, and not just this disconnected sort of paper with words on it.

In the book’s titular essay “Old Truths and New Cliches,” Singer speaks about a writer’s need for spirituality and God. How should we understand what seems to be a mixed message, given his break with religion? I don’t know exactly how he would define himself — as an agnostic or atheist, or maybe a believer in some sort of higher power…

Definitely a believer. There’s no question he’s a believer in divinity and a divine Creator. But he is an absolute nonbeliever in the rabbinic chain of command. Yet he understands that the only way to maintain the Jewish identity — at least from his perspective, not on a personal level, but on a social-historical level — the only way he believes you can maintain a Jewish identity over centuries and millennia is precisely through the rabbinical chain of command that he has rejected.

In that same essay, he says you need to have a sense of good and evil when you’re writing a story.

He’s essentially talking about creative and destructive forces. It’s not a moralistic type of good and evil. It’s, “Does this action, does this belief, does this story that I’m telling lead to a creative act, or does it lead to a destructive act?” What he’s saying is that literature needs conflict, that the world is a landscape for conflict, that you need to understand what this conflict is about and that, in practice, even if there is not an absolute morality, there is a kind of practical morality.

I really enjoyed the lecture-turned-essay “The Kabbalah and Modern Times,” but I was also thinking, this guy basically goes on a digression about the Ein-sof, or Infinite, and the tsimtsum, or absence of the Infinite, and the sefirot, or the Godly attributes, for about 10 pages – in a lecture presented at the University of Michigan, of all places. Those attendees must now know more about Kabbalah than most of the hippies in Nachlaot.

He actually wrote several articles in Yiddish — more descriptive articles, about the differences between the theoretical Kabbalah and the practical Kabbalah. He talks about the goals of the practical Kabbalah, like healing illnesses, and he talks about the theoretical Kabbalah as having no other purpose except for searching for the pure truth. So you’re talking about someone who, sort of along many iterations, spent a lot of time reading about Kabbalah and also explaining its meaning to others. He didn’t need to read Gershom Scholem to write [his first novel] “Satan in Goray,” he already knew what the Kabbalah was. He got it firsthand from his father, from his grandparents. He was raised on Hassidic Kabbalah, and that’s what he was interested in.

But going on for that long to secular audiences?

First of all, it was a topic that interested him. And second of all, it was, as he says, a way of revealing the contours of his own soul. Again, if you pay attention when you read [the biographical note] “The Satan of Our Time,” that little note, then you understand that his whole mission as a writer is not to be a cutesy, famous guy who tells stories.

His mission as a writer is mystical — and this comes back to the prayer and the treatise on God which I recently translated and published, where he combines the spiritual mission behind his writing with his literary practice. You can’t separate them. He had a mission to preach about the paths of spiritual uplifting that can mitigate the influence and the prevalence of destructive forces in the world.

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