‘Old Truths and New Cliché: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer’
By Isaac Bashevis Singer, Edited by David Stromberg
Princeton University Press, 248 pages

Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Nobel Prize laureate, was always interested in ghosts. That renders it especially fitting that we now have a collection of 19 of his essays delivered from beyond the grave. For those who know Singer only through his uncanny fiction, “Old Truths and New Cliché” is a welcome opportunity to burrow inside the mind of the Yiddish master.

“Old Truths,” edited by David Stromberg, is a fruit of the voluminous Singer archives, and is drawn from largely unpublished English translations of essays originally drafted in Yiddish, often under a set of pseudonyms. Singer composed these meditations as grist for the lecture circuit and as a longtime columnist for the Forward. He was involved in their translation, which he called “second originals.” 

One of Singer’s signature creations was his own persona. Born in Poland in 1903, the son of a Hasidic rabbi, his formative years were spent at Warsaw, on Krochmalna Street, an address that would serve as the imaginative wellspring for much of his writing — even as the world into which he was born drowned in blood. Singer moved to New York City in 1935, the same year his scandalous book “Satan in Goray” was published.

“Satan,” which depicts a 17th century shtetl’s descent into madness and debauchery, introduced a talent stranger and more provocative than Yiddish letters had yet seen. His work pursued demons and depicted homosexuality, transvestitism, and depravity, a seediness that Singer mined for the sublime. He idolized his brother, Israel Joshua Singer, the author of the epic “Brothers Ashkenazi,” a blockbuster in 1936. 

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s career was long, and some of his best work appears in short story collections like “Gimpel the Fool” and “The Spinoza of Market Street,” in addition to his first novel published in English, “The Brothers Moskat.” An autobiographical work, “In My Father’s Court,” conjures the world of Krochmalna Street backlit by the glow of Sabbath candles.

“Old Truths” delivers Singer the critic, sophisticated across the full range of his interests. He was, Mr. Stromberg notes, “a literary and intellectual factory.” He goes on to point out that “in Yiddish, Singer doesn’t have a Yiddish accent.” The writer isn’t your zayde. He is a magician with a fountain pen, the one Yiddish writer who became a global star, published in Playboy and Esquire and feted in Stockholm.

The Singer who emerges in these pages is devoted to the autonomy of storytelling from psychological jargon on the one hand and ideological contamination on the other. He believes that writers should write what they know, and is a partisan of specifics over generalizations. “If I write a story about a Hasidic family in Warsaw,” he observes, “I somehow know that, let’s say, Graham Greene is not going to write it.” 

Pushing against the amorphousness of a global literature unmoored from place, Singer insists that “artists, like plants, must have roots, and the deeper the soil, the deeper the roots.” This rhymes with his assertion that “art is, in its essence, national. It is deeply connected with a land, a locality, a group.” You cannot write literature from air, and the stories you are meant to tell are the ones already coursing in your blood.

This is underscored by his fierce attachment to the Yiddish language. He once told a friend — Seth Lipsky, future editor of the English-language edition of the Forward and later of the Sun, who visited Singer in his summer vacation spot at Wengen, Switzerland — that he would not have achieved what he did in literature had he abandoned Yiddish for English.

Authors who use literature to make a point and not tell a yarn draw Singer’s particular ire. “Modern writers increasingly lose the ability to tell a story, although stories are the backbone of every art.” Even the great James Joyce is not immune, as Singer finds that “no commentary can make Finnegans Wake a real work of art.”

In a sharp essay, “Journalism and Literature,” Singer penned a  line that was sure to please his editors at the Forverts. Singer believed that “the good writer is almost always also a good journalist,” because both must entertain and inform impatient readers with wandering eyes. Singer himself did “his best work in the midst of journalistic hullabaloo, often right in the editorial offices between one article and another.”

A draft version of one of Singer’s essays was originally titled “Writers Don’t Write ‘For the Drawer,’” and his published prolixity provides the pleasures of eclecticism. We get Singer’s view on censorship — against it imposed from without, supportive as voluntary restraint — the Kabbalah — “the best of all mystical systems” — and a spoof review of the Ten Commandments, written in the voice of a range of critics. 

In his Nobel Prize banquet speech, Singer posed a set of answers to the question​​, “Why do you write in a dying language?” The first is, “The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it.” The fourth and last was, “Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead.” 

Ghosts that live, mothers that never die, the millions of Jewish dead gabbing in Yiddish for all eternity. These are Isaac Bashevis Singer’s truths. In their strange beauty, they are the perfect tonic to cliché.