Viewing page 7 of 51
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
A CONVERSATION WITH ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER [[image - black & white photograph of Isaac Bashevis Singer]] [[photo credit]] JERRY BAUER [[/photo credit]] [[caption]] Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer's new play Teibele and Her Demon opens this month at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. [[/caption]] In a year in which Broadway has welcomed a musical about a barber who slits his customers' throats, disposing of the bodies in meat pies, and a play about a man Nature has so misformed that he resembles an elephant, it hardly seem unusual that there should be a play about a deserted, pious wife who satisfies her sexual needs with a man she believes is a demon. Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Teibele and her Demon is scheduled to open this month at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, used to have the unfathomable all to himself. But it is becoming a more popular territory. When Singer began writing his stories about sex and the supernatural in the shtetls of Poland, which hardly seemed the natural habitat of lustful and demonic creatures, he was regarded as an oddity. Sex was not a subject that preoccupied the Yiddish speaking community of Warsaw in 1932, when the 28-year-old Singer published his first novel, Satan in Goray, an unexpected blend of messianism and eroticism. Nor did Yiddish readers share his interest in the supernatural, which was regarded as childish and old-fashioned. The literary world outside and inside the ghetto emphasized psychological perception. Both worlds shared a liberal belief that the world was moving toward greater enlightenment, a belief that somehow survived even the horrors of World War II. Slowly, however, the world began to share Singer's obsession with the unfathomable. As Singer discussed his work recently with a visitor to his West Side apartment, he smiled the particular smile of someone who has outlasted and outwitted his critics. "I was never fashionable," he says. "In some ways I still am not. But if a writer waits long enough, fashion will catch up with him." The apartment house in which Singer lives and works is a mammoth, block-wide building with a begrimed, quasi-Renaissance exterior and a dark, cheerless inner courtyard. It inevitably strikes a visitor as European. Singer himself, when he first saw the building, thought, "I am back in Warsaw." The room in which he works overlooks the bustle of upper Broadway and is itself a rather colorless place, its muted greys, beiges and whites brightened only by a few pastels by Singer's friend Raphael Soyer. (Soyer's equally colorless studio has on its musty walls one of Singer's few efforts in nonverbal art, a self-portrait in pencil, verging on caricature). 12 by Howard Kissel [[end page]] [[start page]] [[advertisement]] [[image - color photograph of a mountainous area with heavy vegetation and a waterfall]] [[image - color photograph of a bottle of Grand Mariner Liqueur]] There may still be places on earth where Grand Mariner isn't offered after dinner. Product of France. Made with fine cognac brandy, 80 proof. Carillon Importers, Ltd. New York, New York 10019 © Carillon Importers, Ltd. [[/advertisement]]
