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AZs he speaks, Singer sits in a small beige chair. He seems unaware that its arms were intended for his comfort. He regards them instead as barriers within which he must confine his whole body. As a result he never appears at ease, either leaning forward or slumping downward, his arms resting on his legs. Singer has skin so white and so smooth that when he closes his eyes his face appears to be featureless, a tight mask. It is the eyes that provide the animation, the earnestness, the resignation, and, most often, the sense of irony.

When he describes Teibele, the eyes take on an almost conspiratorial gleam: "It's a real sex story," he says, "In Yentl Yentl's love for the Torah was stronger than her love for a man...or for liberation. (His intonation of the word indicates it is an idea that amuses him.) "Her desire was for spiritual liberation. The people in Teibele don't love one another in the name of the Torah or some idea, but as male and female."

In the short story on which the play is based (included in the collection entitled Short Friday), Teibele never suspects her demon lover is in fact a disgruntled fellow human. In the play Singer has the man confess that he is not a creature from the other world, but Taibele refuses to believe him. "To her he has to be a demon--she has to fall in love with a demon."

Characters for whom sex is so intense a concern were not a part of pre-war Yiddish writing. They seem an unlikely subject for a man now in his seventies, though, in his most recent collection of stories, Old Love, Singer writes, "Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience..." Singer becomes somewhat animated, his leg involuntarily swaying back and forth, as he declares, "I've considered it. It has to be. This is the way God wants it--consciously, subconsciously, we think about sex from the cradle to the grave.

"Sex is very important in the Bible and the Talmud. They were written by Orientals. Only 'enlightened' and overly pious people and atheists are afraid to talk about sex. The atheist has his own piety--he think you should only think of ways to 

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make life better. I make fun of that. You can't make life too good. Crisis is the very essence of human life. Every man is always in a crisis, whether he knows it or not."

Though Singer invokes God in conversation and has Him play almost as important a part in his stories as the creatures from the nether world. Singer's God is not the one that orthodox Jews, whose background he shares, worship: "Their religion is not my religion. I don't believe in all their lists of dogma--like not riding in an elevator on Shabbas." (He shrugs his shoulders that anything so petty should be associated with religion.) "I think of God as a great creative power. I'm not sure if this power has revealed himself or not. Since I was brought up in Judaisim, I can afford my own personal beliefs.

"Something happened on Mt. Sinai. Whether Moses wrote the Ten Commandments or God wrote them I don't know. The fact that a man 4,000 years ago wrote them is even more a miracle than if God wrote them. If a professor discovers something about ants, that's fine. If an ant becomes a professor, this will really be a miracle."

At the end of The Family Moskat, as Nazi planes are dropping bombs over Warsaw, one of the characters announces that the Messiah is coming. "Death tis the Messiah," he says. "That is the real truth." When he is reminded of this moment, Singer wonders if it wasn't an unusually dark assessment, but he doesn't disavow it. "I'm still not an optimist. I'm an optimist as far as the universe is concerned--nothing wrong will happen to the universe. But as far as humanity, people think civilization and technology will make life easier. It isn't so."

In any case, Singer has no desire to philosophize. He thinks of himself mainly as a storyteller. Sometimes critics fault him because they are uncertain of his "message". That doesn't bother him. "The truth is I don't care so much about the messages. I care about the story itself. Let the reader or the critic find the messages. I have often said if all the messages disappeared and the Ten Commandments remained, there would be enough messages for the next 10,000 year.  There's no scarcity of messages. There is a scarcity of good stories." 
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