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FAMILY MOSKAT

Isaac Iiashevis Singer

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Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1978

In one of his more light-hearted books, Isaac Bashevis Singer depicts his childhood in one of the over-populated poor quarters of Warsaw, a Jewish quarter, just before and during the First World War. The book, called In My Father's Court (1966), is sustained by a redeeming, melancholy sense of humour and a clear-sightedness free of illusion. This world has gone forever, destroyed by the most terrible of all scourges that have afflicted the Jews and other people in Poland. But it comes to life in Singer's memories and writing in general. Its mental and physical environment and its centuries-old traditions have set their stamp on Singer as a man and a writer, and provide the ever-vivid subject matter for his inspiration and imagination. It is the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition. Its language was Yiddish – the language of the simple people and of the women, the language of the mothers which preserved fairytales and anecdotes, legends and memories for hundreds of years past, through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in the way of agony, passions, aberrations, cruelty and bestiality, but also of heroism, love and self-sacrifice.

Singer's father was a rabbi, a spiritual mentor and confessor, of the Hasid school of piety. His mother also came from a family of rabbis. The East European Jewish-mystical Hasidism combined Talmud doctrine and a fidelity to scripture and rites – which often merged into prudery and strict adherence to the law – with a lively and sensually candid earthiness that seemed familiar with all human experience. Its world, which the reader encounters in Singer's stories, is a very Jewish but also a very human world. It appears to include everything – pleasure and suffering, coarseness and subtlety. We find obstrusive carnality, spicy, colourful, fragrant or smelly, lewd or violent. But there is also room for sagacity, worldly wisdom and shrewd speculation. The range extends from the saintly to the demoniacal, from quiet contemplation and sublimity, to ruthless obsession and infernal confusion or destruction. It is typical that among the authors Singer read at an early age who have influenced him and accompanied him through life were Spinoza, Gogol and Dostoievsky, in addition to Talmud, Kabbala and kindred writings.

Singer began his writing career as a journalist in Warsaw in the years between the wars. He was influenced by his elder brother, now dead, who was already an author and who contributed to the younger brother's spiritual liberation and contact with the new currents of seething political, social and cultural upheaval. The clash between tradition and renewal, between other-worldliness and faith and mysticism on the one hand, and free thought, secularization, doubt and nihilism on the other, is an essential theme in Singer's short stories and novels. The theme is Jewish, made topical by the barbarous

conflicts of our age, a painful drama between contentious loyalties. But it is also of concern to mankind, to us all, Jew or non-Jew, actualized by modern western culture's struggles between preservation and renewal. Among many other themes, it is dealt with in Singer's big family chronicles -the novels, The Family Moskat (1950), The Manor (1967), and The Estate (1969). These extensive epic works have been compared with Thomas Mann's novel, Buddenbrooks. Like Mann, Singer describes how old families are broken up by the new age and its demands, from the middle of the 19th century up to the Second World War, and how they are split, financially, socially and humanly. But Singer's chronicles are greater in scope than Mann's novel and more richly orchestrated in their characterization. The author's apparently inexhaustible psychological fantasy has created a microcosm, or rather, a well-populated microchaos, out of independent and graphically convincing figures. They bring to mind another writer whom Singer read when young – Leo Tolstoy.

Singer's earliest fictional works, however, were not big novels but short stories and novellas, a genre in which he has perhaps given his very best as a consummate storyteller and stylist. The novel, Satan in Goray, written originally in Yiddish, like practically all Singer books, appeared in 1935 when the Nazi catastrophe was threatening and just before the author emigrated to the USA, where he has lived and worked ever since. It treats of a theme to which Singer has often returned in different ways and with variations in time, place and personages – the false Messiah, his seductive arts and successes, the mass hysteria around him, his fall and the breaking up of illusions in destitution and new illusion, or in penance and purity. Satan in Goray takes place in the 17th century, in the confusion and the sufferings after the cruel ravages of the Cossacks, with outrages and mass murder of Jews and other wretched peasants and artisans. The people in this novel, as elsewhere with Singer, are often at the mercy of the capricious infliction of circumstance, but even more so, their own passions. The passions are frequently of a sexual nature but also of another kind – manias and superstitions, fanatical hopes and dreams, the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power, the nightmares of anguish, and so on. Even boredom can become a restless passion, as with the main character in the tragi-comic picaresque novel, The Magician of Lublin (1961), a most eccentric anti-hero, a kind of Jewish Don Juan and rogue, who ends up as an ascetic or saint.

This is one of the most characteristic themes with Singer – the tyranny of the passions, the power and fickle inventiveness of obsession, the grotesque wealth of variation, and the destructive, but also inflaming and paradoxically creative potential of the emotions. We encounter this tumultuous and colourful world particularly in Singer's numerous and fantastic short stories, available in English translation in about a dozen collections, from the early Gimpel The Fool (translated 1953), to the later work, A Crown of Feathers (1973), with notable masterpieces in between, such as, The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), or, A Friend of Kafka (1970). The passions and crazes are personified in Singer as demons, spectres, ghosts and all kinds of infernal or supernatural powers from the rich storehouse of Jewish popular imagination. These demons are not only graphic literary symbols, but also real, tangible beings – Singer, in fact, says he believes in their physical presence. The middle ages rise up in his work and permeate the present. Everyday life is interwoven with wonders, reality spun from dreams, the blood of the past with the moment in which we are living. This is where Singer's narrative art celebrates its greatest triumphs and bestows a reading experience of a deeply original kind, harrowing, but also stimulating and edifying. Many of his characters step with unquestioned authority into the Pantheon of literature, where the eternal companions and mythical figures live, tragic and grotesque, comic and touching, weird and wonderful people of dream and torment, baseness and grandeur.

Books

Issac Bashevis Singer, born in Leoncin near Warsaw, emigrated 1935 to USA. He died in 1991.

In addition to the works mentioned above Singer's writings include – in English:

the novels

The Slave, transl. by the author and Cecil Hemley. New York: Farrar Straus, 1962; London: Secker and Warburg, 1963.

Enemies: A Love Story, transl. by Alizah Shevrin and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1972.

Shosha. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1978.

Reaches of Heaven. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1980.

The Golem. London: Deutsch, 1983.

The Penitent. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1983.

Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, transl. from the Yiddish by Marion Magid and Elisabeth Pallet. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1983.

The Ring of the Fields. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1988.

Scum, transl. by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1991.

the collections of short stories

Short Friday, transl. by Ruth Whitman and others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1964; London: Seeker and Warburg, 1967.

The Seance, transl. by Ruth Whitman and others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1968; London: Cape, 1970.

Passions, transl. by the author in collab. with others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1975; London: Cape, 1976.

Old Love. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1979.

The Power of Light. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1980.

The Image and Other Stories. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1985.

The Death of Metuselah and Other Stories. London: Cape, 1988.

the memoirs

A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

A Young Man in Search of Love, transl. by Joseph Singer. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

Lost in America. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981.

for children

Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Harper, 1966; London: Secker and Warburg, 1967.

When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1968.

A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing up in Warsaw, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1969.

The Fools of Chelm and Their History, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1973.

Why Noah Chose the Dove, transl. by Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1974.

Stories for Children. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1986.

Isaac Bashevir Singer died on July 24, 1991.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Family Moskat

Book by A. H. Gross, A. H. Gross, A. H. Gross, Isaac Bashevis Singer; Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1950

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my gratitude to those who made possible the publi­cation of this book.

To my sorrow A. H. Gross died before finishing his translation, and I wish to record the passing of a highly gifted and lovable man. The work was completed by his friends Maurice Samuel and Lyon Mear-son, and by his daughter Nancy Gross. Mr. Samuel translated a num-ber of chapters; Mr. Mearson corrected and edited most of the manuscript; Miss Gross did additional translation and editing. For their selfless efforts I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

I wish to thank the Jewish Daily Forward, in which this novel ran as a serial for two years, and Radio Station WEVD, over which a dramatization of this novel has been broadcast.

Finally, I wish to thank Mr. Alfred A. Knopf and his editors Mr. Herbert Weinstock and Mrs. Robert Shaplen for their advice, most helpful in bringing the book to its final state.

I dedicate these pages to the memory of my late brother. I. J. Singer, author of THE BROTHERS ASHKENAZI. To me he was not only the older brother, but a spiritual father and master as well. I looked up to him always as to a model of high morality and literary honesty. Although a modern man, he had all the great qualities of our pious ancestors.

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

1

Five years after the death of his second wife Reb Meshulam Moskat married for a third time. His new wife was a woman in her fifties, from Galicia, in eastern Austria, the widow of a wealthy brewer from Brody, a man of erudition. Sometime before he died, the brewer had gone bankrupt, and all that was left to his widow was a bookcase full of learned tomes, a pearl necklace –which later turned out to be imitation–and a daughter named Adele; her name was properly Eidele, but Rosa Frumetl, her mother, called her Adele, after the modern fashion. Meshulam Moskat made the widow's acquaintance in Karlsbad, where he had gone to take the waters. There he had married her. No one in Warsaw knew anything about the marriage; Reb Meshulam wrote to none of his family from the watering-place, nor was it his habit to give anyone an account of his doings. It was not until the middle of September that a telegram to his housekeeper in Warsaw announced his return and gave orders that Leibel, the coachman, was to drive out to the Vienna Station to wait for his employer. The train arrived toward evening. Reb Meshulam descended from the first-class car, his wife and stepdaughter after him.

When Leibel came up to him Reb Meshulam said: "This is your new mistress," and lowered a ponderous eyelid. All the luggage Reb Meshulam was carrying was a small, well–3-worn portfolio thickly plastered with colored customs labels. He had checked his large metal-strapped trunk through on the bag-gage car. But the ladies were weighted down with all sorts of valises, packages, and bundles. There was hardly enough room in the carriage to stow the stuff away; it was necessary to pile most of it on the driver's box.

Leibel was far from being a timid man, but at the sight of the women he turned red and lost his tongue entirely. The new Madame Moskat was of medium height and thin. Her shoulders showed the beginnings of a stoop, her face was heavily wrinkled. Her nose was red with catarrh and her eyes were the sad, moist

eyes of a woman of gentle birth and breeding. She wore the close-fitting wig of the pious Jewish matron, covered with a soft black shawl. Long earrings hung, glittering, from her earlobes. She was dressed in a silk outer coat, in the style of a pelerine, over a cloth dress, and pointed-toed, French-style shoes. In one hand she carried an amber-handled umbrella; with the other she held fast to her daughter, a girl in her early twenties, tall and slender, with an irregularly shaped nose, prominent-boned features, a sharp chin, and thin lips. There were dark rings under the girl's eyes; she looked as though she had gone sleepless for nights. Her faded blond hair was combed tightly back into a Greek knot and was thickly peppered with hairpins. She was carrying a bunch of withered yellow flowers, a package tied with red ribbon, a large box, and a book, from the edges of which a little bundle of twigs protruded, reminding Leibel of the osier branches used in the ritual on the Feast of Tabernacles. The girl gave off a scent of chocolate, a faint flavor of caraway-seed perfume, and some-thing arrogantly foreign. Leibel grimaced.

"A show-off!" he muttered to himself.

"Adele, my child, this is Warsaw," Rosa Frumetl said. "A big city, isn't it?"

"How do I know? I haven't seen it yet," the girl answered in a flat Galician accent.

As always when Reb Meshulam left on a trip or came back from one, a ring of curious onlookers gathered around him. Everyone in Warsaw knew him, Christians as well as Jews. The newspapers had published stories about him and his enterprises more than once; even his picture had been printed. In appearance he was different from the Warsaw Jews of the old school. He was tall and lean, with thin features, sunken cheeks, and a short white

-4-chin beard, each individual hair separated from the next. From below his bushy eyebrows peered a pair of greenish eyes, steely and piercing. His nose was hooked. On his upper lip there was a scant mustache like the whiskers of a sea lion. He was wearing a cloth cap with a high crown. His overcoat, with a gathered waist and split back, managed to look like an aristocratic caftan. From a distance he might have been taken for one of the Polish gentry or even for a Great Russian. But a closer view showed indications of the sidelocks of the pious Jew on his temples.

Reb Meshulam was in a hurry. Every once in a while he poked Leibel in the shoulder to drive faster. But the loading of the

luggage had taken a long time. Besides, the road from Vielka Street to the Gzhybov was blocked with fire engines and it was necessary to drive by way of the Marshalkovska and the Kru-levska. The street lights were already lit, and around the spherical greenish-blue lamps flew swarms of flies, casting darting shadows onto the sidewalk. From time to time a red-painted tramcar rumbled by, the electric wires overhead giving off crackling blue sparks. Everything here was familiar to Reb Meshulam: the tall buildings with the wide gates, the stores with the brightly illumi-nated windows, the Russian policeman standing between the two rows of car tracks, the Saxon Gardens, with densely leaved branches extending over the high rails. In the midst of the thick foliage tiny lights flickered and died. From inside the park came a mild breeze that seemed to carry the secret whisperings of amo-rous couples. At the gates two gendarmes stood with swords to make sure that no long-caftaned Jews or their wives ventured into the park to breathe some of the fragrant air. Farther along the road was the Bourse, of which Reb Meshulam was one of the oldest members.

The carriage turned into Gzhybov Place, and abruptly every-thing changed. The sidewalks were crowded with gaberdined Jews wearing small cloth caps, and bewigged women with shawls over their heads. Even the smells were different now. There was a whiff of the market place in the air–spoiled fruits, lemons, and a mixture of something sweetish and tarry, which could not be given a name and which impinged on the senses only when one returned to the scene after a longish absence. The street was a bedlam of sound and activity. Street peddlers called out their wares in ear-piercing chants–potato cakes, hot chick peas, apples, pears, Hungarian plums, black and white grapes, watermelon

-5-whole and in sections. Although the evening was warm, the merchants wore outer coats, with large leather money pouches hanging from the belts. Women hucksters sat on boxes, benches, and doorsills. The stalls were lighted with lanterns, some with flickering candles stuck on the edges of wooden crates. Customers lifted and pinched the fruits or took little exploratory nibbles, smacking their lips to savor the taste. The stall-keepers weighed purchases on tin scales.

"Gold, gold, gold!" a beshawled woman shouted out from be-side a crate of squashed oranges.

"Sugar-sweet, sugar-sweet!" sang out a plump girl guarding a basket of moldy plums.

"Wine, wine, wine!" shrieked a red-faced, red-headed peddler, displaying a basket of spoiled grapes. "Nab 'em, grab 'em! Nuzzle 'em, guzzle 'em! Try 'em, buy 'em!"

In the middle of the street, truckmen guided overloaded wag­ons. The heavy, low-slung horses stamped their iron-shod hoofs on the cobbles, sending out sparks. A porter wearing a hat with a brass badge carried an enormous basket of coal strapped to his shoulders with thick rope. A janitor in an oilcloth cap and blue apron was sweeping a square of pavement with a long broom. Youngsters, their little lovelocks flapping under octagonal caps, were pouring out of the doors of the Hebrew schools, their patched pants peeping out from between the skirts of their long coats. A boy with a cap pulled low over his eyes was selling New Year calendars, shouting at the top of his voice. A ragged youth with a pair of frightened eyes and disheveled earlocks stood near a box of prayer shawls, phylacteries, prayerbooks, tin Channukah candle-sticks, and amulets for pregnant women. A dwarf with an over-sized head wandered about with a bundle of leather whips, fan-ning the straps back and forth, demonstrating how to whip stub­born children. On a stall lit by a carbide lamp lay piles of Yid­dish newspapers, cheap novelettes, and books on palmistry and phrenology. Reb Meshulam glanced out of the window of the carriage and observed: "The Land of Israel, eh?"

"Why do they go around in such rags?" Adele asked, grimac-ing.

"That's the custom here," Reb Meshulam answered with a show of impatience. For a moment he played with the idea of telling the two women that he remembered when these tall buildings were put up; that he himself had had no small part in the street's

-6-development; that at night, years before, this very same neighbor-hood had been as black as Egypt, and that goats and hens had meandered in the street in the daytime. But in the first place there was no time for reminiscences–the carriage was almost at its destination–and in the second place Reb Meshulam was not the man to sing his own praises or dwell on the past. He knew that the women sitting beside him were not particularly taken with Warsaw, and for a moment he felt a pang of regret over his hasty marriage. It was all Koppel's fault, he thought to himself. That bailiff of his had him too much in his clutches.

The carriage came to a halt at the gate of Reb Meshulam's house. Leibel jumped down from the box to help his master and

the women. The group gathered about at once broke into a torrent of remarks.

"Take a look!" one woman called out. "Strangers in town!"

"Who's the scarecrow?" shouted a boy in torn pantaloons, with a paper cone on his head for a hat.

"As I live, the old goat's got himself married again," the woman said, this time louder, to make sure the others would hear.

"May I drop dead!"

"Oi, Mamma, it's too much!" a fat girl howled; she clutched a basket of fresh rolls against her chest.

"Hey, make room!" Leibel shouted at the top of his voice. "What the devil are you standing around for? A convention of idiots, may a plague take you all!"

He pushed a path through the throng and carried three valises to the steps leading to Reb Meshulam's flat. The janitor and his wife came out to help. A barefoot boy in pants too big for him darted in from the outskirts of the crowd and jerked a handful of hair from the horse's tail. The horse started violently. The baker's girl shouted at him: "Hey, you bastard! May your hands rot!"

"You too, you two-kopek whore," the boy yelled back at her.

Rosa Frumetl hurried her daughter along after her to get away from the vulgar talk. Soon the three of them–Reb Meshulam, his wife, and his stepdaughter–made their way through the front entrance of the house and climbed the single flight of stairs to the Moskat apartment.

-7-

2

Naomi, the domestic, and Manya, her assistant, had been prepar-ing for the master's arrival ever since Reb Meshulam's wire had come. Now they were dressed in their finest. The lamps in the sa­lon, the library, the master's study, the dining-room, and the bed-rooms were alight–Reb Meshulam liked everything to be bright against his homecomings. The place was large, had twelve rooms; but half of them had been closed up since the death of his second wife.

The news that he had married again and was bringing a third wife and a stepdaughter back with him was passed on to the serv­ants by Leibel the coachman. He whispered the tidings into

Naomi's ear and she clutched at her enormous bosom and let out a shriek. The janitor, entering with the luggage, confirmed the news, but there was no time to discuss it because Meshulam and the newcomers were on the way up. Naomi and Manya waited for them at the door, their white aprons spotless, like deferential serv­ants in an aristocratic household. When Reb Meshulam opened the door and greeted them, they answered together: "Good eve-ning, master, a blessed homecoming."

"I suppose you know already–they told you–this is your new mistress, and this is her daughter."

"Good luck! Good luck! May you have good fortune!"

Naomi threw a quick glance at the two women, and her sharp eyes almost popped out of her head. Her first impulse was to give Manya a pinch on her well-rounded rump, but the girl wasn't standing near enough.

The fat Naomi, in a blond matron's wig, her own hair artfully combed about its edges, was herself twice widowed. She was al-ready in her late thirties, but looked younger. The neighborhood –half of Jewish Warsaw, in fact–knew of her shrewdness and the energy and dispatch with which she carried on the affairs of the Moskat household. "Naomi the Cossack," people called her. When she walked around the house, the floors trembled beneath her heavy tread. When she shouted at Manya, her powerful voice could be heard out in the courtyard. Her sarcastic remarks and devastating retorts were renowned all through the Gzhybov sec­tion. She was well paid, far above the usual scale for a domestic, and it was reputed that she had a respectable sum invested with Reb Meshulam at substantial interest.

-8-

"A cunning specimen," Leibel the coachman said about her. "A lawyer in a cook's apron!"

Manya was ten years younger than Naomi. In actuality she wasn't in Reb Meshulam's service, but in Naomi's. Reb Meshulam paid Naomi and she had hired the girl to carry the basket after her to market and to scrub the floors. Manya was dark, with a flat face, prominent jaw, wide nose, and slanting Kalmuk eyes. She wore her hair braided in rings at either side of her face. Below them large earrings dangled, bobbing up and down like springs. Around her throat she wore a circlet of silver coins. Naomi didn't need her so much to help in the running of the house–most of the work she liked to do herself–as to have someone around to

talk to. When Reb Meshulam was away on a journey the two women ran the household as though it was their own. They drank mead, munched on chick peas, and played cards. Manya had a kind of gypsy luck, and Naomi kept on losing to her.

"She's always beating me," Naomi would complain. "The luck of a provincial idiot!"

Passing by the two servants as they stood bobbing and giggling, Meshulam led his wife and stepdaughter into the flat. In the dining-room stood an oversize table with extension wings at each end, and around it heavy oak chairs with high-railed back rests. A credenza covered one entire wall, the shelves loaded with wine beakers, spice- and herb-holders, samovars, all sorts of carafes, trays, and vases. Behind the glass panes were porcelain dishes and quantities of silver utensils, dented and worn from constant scour-ing and polishing. From the ceiling hung a heavy oil lamp that could be raised or lowered by means of bronze chains and a gourd filled with small shot to serve as a counterweight.

In Reb Meshulam's private study there were an iron safe and a closet full of old account books. The room smelled of dust, ink, and sealing wax. Book-lined shelves covered three walls of the library. On the floor in a corner lay an enormous volume bound in leather and stamped in gold: a Bible concordance that Reb Meshulam preferred to keep apart from the orthodox volumes. Rosa Frumetl went over to the shelves, lifted out a book, looked at the title page, and said to Reb Meshulam: "I wonder if you have my late husband's book here."

"What's that? How should I know? I don't know all of them."

"Written by my late husband, may he rest in peace. I still have a lot of his manuscripts."

-9-"The things Jews write–there's no end to them!" Reb Meshu-lam commented with a shrug.

He showed them his bedroom with its twin oak beds, and the salon, a spacious room with four windows and a carved ceiling with traces of gold paint. Around the walls stood easy chairs up-holstered in yellow satin, and sofas, taborets, and cabinets. On a piano covered with a linen throw stood a pair of gilt candle-sticks. A candelabrum descended from the ceiling in a cluster of glass prisms. A large Channukah lamp hung on a wall. A seven-branched candlestick, a Menorah, stood on a mantel.

Rosa Frumetl breathed a gentle sigh. "May it witness no evil.

A palace!"

"Ha! It cost a fortune," Reb Meshulam remarked, "and it isn't worth a pinch of snuff."

Abruptly he left mother and daughter alone in the room and went to his study to recite the evening prayers. Adele took off her coat, revealing a white blouse with pleated sleeves and a neck ribbon tied in a bow. She had narrow shoulders, thin arms, and a flat chest. In the light of the kerosene lamp her hair took on a coppery tinge. Rosa Frumetl sat down on a small divan and rested her pointed shoes on a footstool.

"Well, daughter da