Isaac Bashevis Singer with Agi Legutko – Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature S4E11

Isaac Bashevis Singer is celebrated today in Poland as the honorary patron of Warsaw’s annual international festival of Jewish culture. He wrote in Yiddish, and in a famous interview with Philip Roth stated that Yiddish and Polish writers in Poland occupied distinct and separate worlds before WWII. At the same time, his early stories take place on unquestionably Polish territory in Warsaw and the area around Lublin, and the language that he considers normative is the Yiddish particular to Polish-Ukrainian Galicia (as opposed to the German or Lithuanian dialects). Even the situations described can find analogues in Polish literature, such as scene of the Jewish community gathering to chop and pickle cabbage that practically mirrors a scene in Stanisław Reymont’s Peasants. So, when Poland counts its Nobel Prize winners, should they include Singer (1978) along with Sienkiewicz (1905), Reymont (1924), Miłosz (1980), Szymborska (1996), and most recently Tokarczuk (2018) who takes up many of Singer’s themes in her monumental work, The Books of Jacob? Would Singer want to include himself, if we may speculate, and would it matter? In this episode we look at a selection of five stories, “Gimpel the Fool,” “Taibele and Her Demon,” “The Last Demon,” “Zeitel and Rickel,” and “Cafeteria,” which raise topics about the mystical culture of the Lublin region where many of his early stories take place, magic realism, the world of demons, dybbuks, and ghosts, false messiahs, holy fools and erudite rabbis, the view of prewar Polish-Jewish culture through the haze of the Holocaust, the conflict of the traditionalist mitnagdim and the mystical Hasidim, homosexuality and sexual taboos that Singer wrote about freely, fundamental human stories of love and death, Singer’s metafiction in his more autobiographical writing, and the metaphysics of madness as it works itself out on the streets of New York. Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website: https://bit.ly/4fdduTm Access the playlist of the entire series: https://bit.ly/47Q7xHL Bartek Remisko, Executive Producer David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer Natalia Iyudin, Producer