“A Splendid Anachronism”: The Yiddish Voices of the Family Singer

Taking the balegole, the shtetl coachman or urban cabby, as its point of departure, this essay explores the representation of speech in the work of the Singer family of writers. Like the balegole, however, some of these dramatized speech scenarios—one Jew talking to his horse or talking Torah to himself—were already an ethnographic relic, or “a splendid anachronism,” in the words of Aaron Zeitlin, by the time the Singer siblings came of age. The first to exploit and expand upon this speech typology was Esther Kreitman in Der sheydim-tants (1936). Set in the ultra-conservative Hasidic heartland and fueled by a deep pessimism, I. J. Singer’s Of a World That Is No More (1944) typifies the reactionary modernism of the two male siblings. By going backward in time, therefore, the Singer family of writers made a quantum leap forward; notably, with the historical novels Yoshe Kalb (1932) and Satan in Goray (1933), and at full throttle in 1943 with Bashevis’s invention of a fantastical-diabolical narrator, steeped in Jewish learning. It was in American exile that the youngest, most intellectually ambitious and most talented of the Singer family of writers found his Yiddish voice.