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Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer é, certamente, um dos grandes autores da Literatura e um dos melhores contistas de todos os tempos - ao lado de Borges, Tchecov, Maupassant e Poe.

Polonês, ele emigrou para os Estados Unidos antes da Segunda Guerra e morou em Nova Iorque até sua morte, recentemente. Por decisão consciente, escreveu toda sua obra em iídiche, que não era a sua língua nativa mas que ele considerava possuir vantagens incomuns. Merecidamente - caso raro! - ganhou o Nobel de Literatura de 1978.

Quando seus contos se passam em aldeias judaicas da Europa Oriental, num passado distante, eu freqüentemente não consigo me relacionar, o tema me parece longínquo demais, mas quando seus contos se passam no século XX, entre os judeus da diáspora, são simplesmente irresistíveis.

Mês passado, li o romance que é considerado sua obra-prima, Satã em Gorai, mas não consegui me envolver. O livro conta a história de uma aldeia polonesa do século XVII que é tomada pela certeza messiânica de que o fim do mundo é iminente e de como isso afeta a tudo e a todos. Satã em Gorai, aliás, está na lista dos 100 romances do século da Folha.

Tenho cá um volume de seus contos escolhidos, que é um dos meus maiores tesouros. A Companhia das Letras acabou de lançar uma coleção de seus 47 melhores contos que recomendo para todos. É simplesmente a melhor introdução para Singer.

Está em minha fila o romance Shadows on the Hudson, publicado postumamente, sobre a comunidade judaica de Nova Iorque.

Isaac Bashevis Singer completaria 100 anos em 2004.

Leiam artigo do New York Times de domingo, 26 de dezembro, sobre Gimpel, the Fool (Gimpel, o Tolo), talvez seu conto mais famoso:

"On Singer's 100th Anniversary, the Debate Still Rages Over a Famous Fool

By ADAM COHEN

When the townspeople of Frampol tell Gimpel that the Czar is coming to their forlorn little village, he instantly believes it. When they tell him his parents have risen from the grave, Gimpel throws on his wool vest to look for them. Whatever story his neighbors come up with, no matter how wildly improbable, Gimpel accepts it at face value. "I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool," says the notably self-aware Gimpel. "The last one stuck."

Gimpel is the narrator and quasi hero of "Gimpel the Fool," Isaac Bashevis Singer's best-known and most widely anthologized short story, and one of the most perplexing characters in modern literature. Because this year has been the centenary of Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, Gimpel has been the subject of an unusual amount of discussion, including a panel this month at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan that posed the question, "Was Gimpel a Fool?" A more basic question Singer's story suggests, however, is whether in this deeply flawed world it is really so great to be wise.

"Gimpel the Fool," which has been called the greatest story ever written about a schlemiel, arrived on the New York literary scene with a splash in 1953, when Partisan Review published Saul Bellow's still-classic translation. It was a significant milestone in the crossover success of Singer, who had fled Poland in 1935, when the Nazi shadow was growing darker, and found a home in exile at The Jewish Daily Forward, where he wrote stories and serialized novels in Yiddish, many of them set in the world he left behind.

Singer's writings often dwell on the darkness of the human heart: the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman called him the "Yiddish Hawthorne." Many of his works, including two that were made into movies, "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy" and "Enemies, a Love Story," have psychically wounded protagonists. Yentl is a rabbi's daughter with "the soul of a man and the body of a woman," who must live as a man to study Torah. "Enemies" centers on a Holocaust survivor in New York, and the three refugee women he juggles, who are as damaged as he is.

On the surface, Gimpel's world is far less fraught. He works as a baker in an Eastern European shtetl, where life hews closely to tradition. The townspeople, having come to appreciate Gimpel's credulity, mislead him in increasingly significant ways. He is persuaded to marry the town whore, Elka, whose bastard child is, he is told, her little brother. When she gives birth four months after their wedding, Gimpel is persuaded that he is the child's father.

In time, Gimpel wises up. On her deathbed, Elka confesses that none of their six children are his. After she dies, the Spirit of Evil visits Gimpel in a dream, and tells him to get his revenge on the town by urinating in the dough before he bakes it, so the townspeople can "eat filth." Gimpel decides not to. Instead, he leaves Frampol and becomes a wandering storyteller who spins "yarns - improbable things that could never have happened - about devils, magicians, windmills and the like" - much like Singer himself.

Literature is full of simpletons, but Gimpel is a fool of an unusual sort. His lack of sense does not involve hatching inane schemes or uttering nonsense. He is foolish only in his relations with other people and, more specifically, his willingness to have faith in them when there is no good reason to. Unlike most fools, Gimpel is aware of his foolishness: he knows that much of what he is being told is highly improbable, but he makes a conscious - even a moral - decision to believe. He consults a rabbi, who tells him, "It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil." Gimpel ends up defending his faith with an arresting comparison: "Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in."

"Gimpel" is, at least partly, a tribute to a classic Eastern European Jewish type, the simple, long-suffering man who accepted what the world handed him, and a dissent from the emerging, modern sensibility that argued for a more active approach to the world. When the story was written, many of Singer's fellow Yiddish writers were socialists, or idealists of other stripes. But Singer, perhaps because he was so attuned to man's imperfections, was skeptical of their wild dreams. The story ends with Gimpel waiting hopefully for the next world, where things will be simpler and purer and where "God be praised ... even Gimpel cannot be deceived."

Singer often said that he and Gimpel were one and the same, which some critics considered laughable coming from the wily and sagacious Singer. But they may have been too focused on how Gimpel starts, rather than where he finishes. It is no accident that when he comes to his senses - rejecting Frampol, but keeping his own innate goodness intact - he, like Singer, takes flight and becomes a storyteller.

"Gimpel" is, in the end, a sly rebuke to rationalism, and is a story in which the author explains, and defends, his decision to become a writer. In his Nobel lecture, Singer argued that storytellers might have the best chance of anyone to "rescue civilization." Writing fiction might not seem like the most direct way to improve the human condition, but Singer suggested that in a world where politics often failed, or worse, succeeded disastrously, intelligent, logical interactions with the world - the kind Gimpel spent a lifetime avoiding - may well be overrated. "Some of my cronies in the cafeteria near The Jewish Daily Forward in New York call me a pessimist and a decadent," Singer told his Swedish audience, "but there is always a background of faith behind resignation."

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