Province of Irony

By Stefan Kanfer

LOST IN AMERICA by Isaac Bashevis Singer Illustrations by Raphael Soyer Doubleday; 259 pages; $17.95

In The Once and Future King, T.H.

White imagined Merlin as a wizard who lived backward, progressing from dotage to youth. It was yet another instance of literature anticipating life--as, for example, the life of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

At 76, Singer writes with the vigor of a man arriving at his prime. It seems impossible to think of the Nobel laureate as anything but a master of "impassioned narrative art," for which he was cited in 1978.

But it was not always so. In Lost in America, Singer recalls the mid-'30s, when he left his native Poland for the Promised City, New York, N.Y. Obscured by the reputation of his expatriate older brother, Novelist I.J. Singer, Isaac becomes a stateless wanderer, at home

only in the province of irony. He can no longer adhere to the liturgical beliefs of his father, but he refuses the blandishments of Stalin's comrades, many of whom will later perish in the Gulag. On his way to Paris, he rides through Germany eating matzohs and looking numbly through train windows at German flags displaying an unfamiliar design: the swastika.

Boarding with his brother in the U.S., Isaac hears the novelist railing, "All life in America keeps constantly changing. How can such a nation create a real literature?"

Yet to write about the Old World seems even riskier. An emigre issues a warning that is to echo down to the days of Philip Roth: "The scribblers here try to persuade the reader that the shtetl was a paradise full of saints. So comes along someone from the very place and he says 'stuff and nonsense!' They'll excommunicate you here, but don't be alarmed."

Isaac is neither alarmed nor excommunicated; he is merely ignored. To survive he does journalistic hackwork; to amuse himself, he records the conversation of characters who, 40 years later, seem to have just stepped from a kosher cafeteria. A divorcee reduces world conflict to a domestic squabble: "I made the same mistake as our allies are making . . .

I tried to appease a person who knows war only." An optimist offers proof that homo sapiens is on the ascent: "After all, we were once apes and now we're human. It's a long distance between a gorilla and Mahatma Gandhi." If ridicule is used to illuminate the cast imperfect, Singer is not afraid to turn it on himself.

He mocks his belief in suicide as consolation, recalls his solemn and frantic pursuit of women, and reprints some of his early and awkward literary efforts. In the process, with an artlessness that conceals art, he manages to re-create not only his early self but the epoch that formed him.

The sure hand and the total recall may make readers wonder if Singer was ever a greenhorn. That he is a wizard, there can be no doubt.

--By Stefan Kanfer

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