Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1950 novel, ‘The Family Moskat’, written in Yiddish by the then resident New Yorker, presents the unfolding passions and dramas of a society of Jews living in Warsaw the first thirty-nine years of the twentieth century. Lengthy, but totally absorbing, we are drawn into this complex and rich world, its ancient traditions, knowing it is shortly to be wiped out. Singer’s aim here, and his triumph, is to convey some idea of what this enormity might mean.
Our guide through the Moskat maze is, for the most part, one Asa Heshel Bannet, passionate, contrary, moody, sexually magnetic, much like the protagonists of Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, etc. fascinating because they are always doing, but perhaps not all that likeable or admirable. Asa is a disturbing, disruptive force within the family, but he is not alone in this. From the powerful old patriarch Meshulam Moskat right through to the relatively powerless young women, distinctive and forceful personalities abound.
In a Paris Review interview Singer remarked that he was not a fan of Thomas Mann, but ‘Buddenbrooks’ is the novel that stands squarely behind this one. As with ‘Buddenbrooks’, we observe a generational decline and fall: a diminution, decay, even corruption, of moral matters and the disciplines and rules of behaviour that underpin and define the extended family structure.
Not being Jewish myself, much here was new to me. What I found most interesting was how complete this society was and how vital. Somebody remarks somewhere how it has survived with its customs and beliefs virtually intact for a thousand years, and within a different, often hostile, milieu. But not for long.
We know how it ends, but the characters don’t, and here is the key. We quickly see, despite all the differences, how much these people are like us, bumbling along with life and loves and losses as best they can, making it up as they go. Even viewing their actions through the dramatic irony of our terrible fore-knowledge we can’t help but emote and sympathise, live their lives with them, and perhaps our sympathies expand through this fore-knowledge.
Singer arrived in New York in 1935 at age thirty-one and stayed. He did not experience the Holocaust first hand. Although Yiddish was his first language, obviously by the time he came to write this work, he could have employed English, as did Saul Bellow, another Yiddisher. A larger audience, and why choose to write in a patois probably doomed to perish beyond a generation? Singer closely monitored his English translations (this was his first book published in English), but never did them himself. We’ll assume his decision is a political act as well as one of solidarity.
I also wondered whether writing in Yiddish he felt more naturally close to some of the literary traditions of that language, particularly its folk and parable idioms. Time and again Singer quotes traditional Jewish sayings and proverbs. Also many of his characters, although realistic, seem to have stepped out of a fable, or only one remove from that. Which gives the ‘whole’ a bit of a ‘lost world’ feeling that fits in with his overall purpose. And there is the underlying spiritualism. This world of his is contained within its Judaism, as it is in Bellow, but unlike Bellow, here we are always aware of the non-Jewish world outside and around, the powers that really control and determine matters. The Jews are finally dependent on the grace of others, which is no assured thing.
It could perhaps be charged against ‘The Family Moskat’ that Singer sacrifices depth for scope. He certainly employs a broad canvas, but I found the characters sharply etched. We never lose sight of who is who and where they fit. A remarkable achievement, in fact a great and deeply moving work.