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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
This essay analyses the later fiction of Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer through the prism of his vegetarianism. Singer figured his adoption of a vegetarian diet in 1962 as a kind of conversion, pronouncing it a “religion” that was central to his being. Here I outline Singer's vegetarian philosophy, and argue that it was the underlying ethical precept in the fiction written after the conversion. I demonstrate the way in which that ethic informs the presentation of both Judaism and women in Singer's later writings. The piece concludes with the suggestion that this vegetarian ethic was the mainspring of the critique of humanism found in Singer's final novels.
1 Isaac Bashevis Singer, preface to Rosen, Steven, Food for the Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions (San Diego, CA: Bala Books, 1987), i–ii, iiGoogle Scholar.
2 Singer frequently shoehorned his vegetarianism into interviews. When Marshall Breger and Bob Barnhart, for example, announce the conclusion of their interview with the writer, Singer interjects, commenting, “Let me add to you that I am a sincere vegetarian. You may be interested to know that”. Breger and Barnhart are clearly not interested in the ensuing exposition of Singer's vegetarianism. Singer's vegetarianism was one of the few topics, perhaps the only topic, which Singer was consistent about through interviews, his writing, and his personal life. Breger, Marshall and Barnhart, Bob, “A Conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in Malin, Irving, ed., Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 27–43, 42Google Scholar.
3 Hadda, Janet, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80Google Scholar.
4 Kresh, Paul, Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street (New York: The Dial Press, 1979), 21Google Scholar.
5 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, Love and Exile: The Early Years – A Memoir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 234–35Google Scholar. There is not space here for an extended discussion of Jewish dietary laws and vegetarianism. As with most scripture, there is contradiction and debate. The usual conclusion is that these laws allow for killing when it is necessary and in accordance with strict rules (kashrut). Since Singer and his vegetarian characters dispute the necessity of such killing, they do not look to these laws for clarification on their vegetarianism, which figures instead as a personal ethic. (The dispute between personal ethic and religious duty in Singer is explored later in the essay through my readings of “The Slaughterer” and The Penitent). Richard Schwartz admits in the opening to his book on vegetarianism and Judaism that much of what he suggests could be “gainsaid,” by referring to passages in the Torah which discuss sacrifice at Temple, and eating meat, so that his own advocacy of Jewish vegetarianism requires a “leap of faith.” Schwartz, Richard H., Judaism and Vegetarianism (Smithtown, NY: Exposition Press, 1990), xiGoogle Scholar. Jonathan Safran Foer asks whether the very concept of kosher meat has become a contradiction in terms due to factory farming. Foer, Jonathan Safran, Eating Animals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 70Google Scholar.
6 Alexander, Edward, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 6Google Scholar.
7 Hadda, Singer: A Life, 227 n. 40.
8 Ibid., 146–47.
9 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, “The Yiddish Writer in America,” in Rosenberg, Bernard and Goldstein, Ernest, eds., Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York Drawn from Conversations with Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 27–44, 39Google Scholar.
10 The figure of the vegetarian has a long, though not extensive, history in fiction. Mary Shelley used vegetarianism as a way to distinguish her creature from humankind in Frankenstein (1818), and as a utopian ideal in her postapocalyptic The Last Man (1826). And, indeed, it is in utopic and dystopic fiction that vegetarianism has made its most frequent appearance, featuring in Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Sarah Scott's Milenium Hall [sic] (1762), Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1862), H. G. Wells's On a Modern Utopia (1905), and the Oryx and Crake series (2003–13) by Margaret Atwood. Perhaps unsurprisingly vegetarianism has not only featured as an ideal, but as a figure of the comedic, sometimes as a well-meant but misguided principle, as in Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar (1955) and Graham Greene's The Comedians (1966). The most recent vegetarian in Jewish American writing – the fictionalized version of the author in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002) – represents something of a coming together of the comedic and the sincere since the humour provoked when Foer's pathetic potato dinner falls to the floor dissolves the tension between the characters, and produces a mutual point of contact for them.
11 Singer and his work are often invoked in books advocating or exploring animal rights, but, more usually than not, as cultural example, rather than as object of literary analysis. Patterson's, Charles Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002)Google Scholar, which takes its title from Singer's short story “The Letter Writer,” is the most comprehensive overview of the vegetarian moments in the writer's work. Edward Alexander is one of the few literary critics to give credence to the vegetarianism. His book on the short stories of Singer includes a very brief section titled “Vegetarian Tales,” and Alexander notes that “at his best, Singer uses the vegetarian theme to reveal the profound injustice at the heart of the universe.” Alexander, 69. A subtler, but still brief, analysis is to be found in Pick's, Anat fine Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, which contains a section on animality and the holocaust. In The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion, 2013)Google Scholar, Stephen F. Eisenman discusses Singer in the context of the artist Chaim Soutine.
12 This essay is, of course, literary criticism, and is not intended as an argument in favour of vegetarianism, though it would be disingenuous to suggest that my approach is not flavoured by my own views on the matter. I try to follow the logic of Singer's thought according to historical and ethical precedent, but this is not a systematic attempt to fit Singer into the history of vegetarianism, or to provide a detailed examination of that history. Those interested in that history should consult Stuart, Tristram, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006)Google Scholar, or Spencer, Colin, Vegetarianism: A History (London: Grub Street Publishing, 2016)Google Scholar. For a scholarly consideration of the benefits of vegetarianism see Fox, Michael Allen, Deep Vegetarianism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; for less scholarly but quite lively arguments against vegetarianism see Lestel, Dominique, Eat This Book: A Carnivore's Dilemma, tr. Steiner, Gary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)Google Scholar. Cora Diamond's classic essay “Eating Meat and Eating People” remains the most philosophically astute consideration of vegetarianism. Diamond is broadly in favour of vegetarianism but skewers the most commonly invoked reasons for it. The essay is included in Sunstein, Cass R. and Nussbaum, Martha, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93–107Google Scholar. Safran Foer's Eating Animals (cited above) provides a readable personal account of vegetarianism.
13 The main character in Singer's short story “The Letter Writer,” which I will discuss later on, is also called Herman, so I will refer to Herman Broder of Enemies as “Broder” in the remainder of this essay.
14 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, Enemies: A Love Story, tr. Shevrin, Aliza and Shubb, Elizabeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 166Google Scholar.
15 Alexander, Edward, Isaac Bashevis Singer (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 104Google Scholar.
16 Descartes, René, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Cress, Donald A., 4th edn (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 31Google Scholar.
17 Oliver Goldsmith, quoted in Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1984), 35Google Scholar.
18 As Rogers and Kaplan note in their essay on the interface between scientific knowledge and legislation for animal rights, it is within “living memory that Descartes's views have found a continued reflection in everyday attitudes.” Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, “All Animals Are Not Equal: The Interface between Scientific Knowledge and Legislation for Animal Rights,” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, 175–204, 193. Here I cannot go into the full history of the relationship between the human and nonhuman. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, is still the best place to start for this. For human relationships with animals and vegetarianism specifically, see the references given in notes 12 and 37.
19 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, “The Letter Writer,” tr. Shevrin, Alizah and Shub, Elizabeth, in Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to the Letter Writer, ed. Stavans, Ilan (New York: The Library of America, 2004), 724–55, 750Google Scholar. The comparison with the Holocaust has also been made in fictional terms by J. M. Coetzee in The Lives of Animals (1999) and by several other thinkers, including Derrida, Jacques in “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow),” tr. Wills, David, Critical Inquiry, 28, 2 (2002), 369–418, 395CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In art it has been made most notably, perhaps, by Sue Coe. It is, of course, a contentious claim, the legitimacy of which has been challenged most vocally by the Anti-defamation League. Derrida is particularly careful to note that a comparison between human and animal genocide cannot be dismissed simply on the grounds that the human has greater value, but he is also attentive to the fact that the comparison may inhibit the articulation of the uniqueness of suffering. For a discussion of Derrida's view see Calarco, Matthew, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University, 2008), 112Google Scholar. For more on the comparison see Patterson, passim, and Sztybel, David, “Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?”, Ethics and the Environment, 11, 1 (2006), 97–132CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here I make no judgement about the ethical validity of the comparison; I do argue, however, that it is essential to a proper reading of Singer's fiction that we try to understand the logic behind that comparison.
20 Midgley, Mary, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, reprint (London and New York: Routledge 1998), 157–58Google Scholar.
21 Singer, Isaac Bashevis and Burgin, Richard, Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 152Google Scholar.
22 G. E. Moore suggested in Principia Ethica that the mistaken notion that evolution is all about how the higher species survives the lower rests upon the assumption that “we can kill them faster than they can kill us.” As he points out, “this forms no part of Darwin's scientific theory.” Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 47Google Scholar.
23 Singer, Enemies, 257.
24 Coined by the psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970, the term was popularized by the philosopher Peter Singer in his 1975 book Animal Liberation, in which the author explained, “The racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. The Sexist violates the principle of equality by favouring the interests of his own sex. Similarly, the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.” Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation, reprint edn (London: Jonathan Cape: 1976), 9Google Scholar.
25 Midgley, 255–56.
26 “Apparently licentious” is Alexander's term. Alexander, Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction, 65.
27 Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Noerr, Gunzelin Schmid, tr. Jephcott, Edmund (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2002), 2Google Scholar. Adorno shared with the other members of the Frankfurt school an abiding interest in nonhuman animals. The rebuke to Kantian idealism here is based on its assumption that nonhuman animals, though sentient and capable of suffering, lacked autonomy and so could be regarded as “things”. The only value animals have, then, in the Kantian system, comes from their use-value to humans.
28 Adorno, Theodor W., Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Fragments and Texts, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf, tr. Jephcott, Edmund (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 80Google Scholar.
29 Tiedemann, Rolf in Adorno, Theodor W., Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar.
30 Adorno, Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, tr. Jephcott, E. F. N. (London: Verso, 1978), 105Google Scholar.
31 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak quoted in Wolfe, Cary, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7Google Scholar.
32 Isaac Bashevis Singer, foreword to Giehl, Dudley, Vegetarianism: A Way of Life (London: Harper & Row, 1979), viii–ixGoogle Scholar.
33 Lee, Grace Farrell, “Seeing and Blindness: A Conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 9, 2 (1976), 151–64, 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 I am grateful to Stephen F. Eisenman for pointing this out to me. In The Cry of Nature, Eisenman traces this “scream” as it appears in art from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first.
35 Oswald, John, The Cry of Nature; Or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1791), 57–58Google Scholar.
36 For a subtle discussion of Oswald see Eisenman, 144–46.
37 Singer 1972, 53. I doubt that Singer gave much consideration to the term “rights” here (and this is, of course, a translated text); its use, however, both signifies the gap in available concepts and terminology (still a problem today) and highlights the character's proposition (Singer's too) that the rigid distinction between human and nonhuman animal is false. The question of animal rights has produced long and heated debate (as have all other types of “rights,” of course). For the history of the term, and the debate surrounding it, one might turn to Peter Singer, Animal Liberation; Regan, Tom, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Kean, Hilda, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion, 1998)Google Scholar; Ryder, Richard D., Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes towards Speciesism (Oxford: Berg, 2000)Google Scholar; Cavalieri, Paola, The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Sunstein and Nussbaum, Animal Rights; Waldau, Paul, Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
38 For an illuminating discussion of Wittgenstein's comment see Wolfe, Animal Rites, 44–54. The fact that it is parrots who are demanding their rights establishes the connection between character and author. Singer was very fond of birds and at the time that Enemies was published had two pet parakeets. It is reasonable to suggest, then, that Broder, at this moment, is a mouthpiece for the author.
39 Satan in Goray was serialized in Globus between January and September 1933 as Der sotn in Goray, and published in English in 1955.
40 Eisenman, 220.
41 Singer, “The Yiddish Writer in America,” 39.
42 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Slaughterer,” tr. Mirra Ginsburg, in Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to the Letter Writer, 546–57, 546.
43 Ibid., 546–48.
44 Malin, Critical Views, xiv.
45 Ibid., xvi.
46 Alexander, Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction, 69.
47 Malin, xv.
48 Singer, “The Slaughterer,” 546.
49 Ibid., 549.
50 Ibid., 551.
51 Ibid., 551.
52 In The Penitent, discussed below, the main character, Shapiro, Joseph, comments, “I've thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.” Singer, Isaac Bashevis, The Penitent (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 39Google Scholar.
53 Malin, xvi.
54 Singer, “The Slaughterer,” 556–57.
55 Calarco, Zoographies, 42.
56 Singer, “The Slaughterer,” 555.
57 Ibid., 550.
58 Ibid., 551.
59 Adams, Carol J., The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist–Vegetarian Critical Theory, twentieth anniversary edn (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2010)Google Scholar. Adams writes of the relationship between meat eating and menstruation at various points. See for instance, 178, and 214–15, where she writes that “gender roles, male dominance, and menstruation, to name just a few issues that arise from women's experience, are intertwined with our mythology of meat eating,” and suggests that there may be a connection between menstruation and a woman's decision to become a vegetarian. Clearly, this is a rather different kind of connection than we find in Singer.
60 Ibid., 217.
61 Beck, Evelyn Torton, “I. B. Singer's Misogyny,” Lilith, 6 (1979), 34Google Scholar. Even “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” from Short Friday and Other Stories (1964), made into something of a feminist cause célèbre by Barbra Streisand's Hollywood film version, had nothing to do with women's liberation in the eyes of Singer. “She doesn't want worldly things,” Singer commented on the occasion of the opening of the original theatre production of the story, “She only wants to study Torah. And she wasn't fighting for other women – only herself.” Singer, quoted in Hadda, Singer: A Life, 189.
62 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, Shadows on the Hudson, tr. Sherman, Joseph (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998), 112Google Scholar.
63 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Fast,” tr. Mirra Ginsburg, in Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to the Letter Writer, 420–29, 420, 426.
64 Hence why a novel about a man married to three women is titled Enemies: A Love Story.
65 Singer, “The Fast,” 421.
66 Spilka, Mark, “Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Deadly Pleasures of Misogyny,” in Spilka, Eight Lessons in Love: A Domestic Violence Reader (London and Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 321–45Google Scholar.
67 Singer, “The Fast,” 425.
68 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Blood,” tr. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elizabeth Pollet, in Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to the Letter Writer, 353–70, 353.
69 Schopenhauer, Arthur, “On Women,” in Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, selected and translated by Hollingdale, R. J. (London: Penguin, 2004), 80–88, 85Google Scholar; Singer, “Blood,” 353.
70 Schopenhauer, 84.
71 Singer, “Blood,” 353, 355. Although I am arguing that the primary impetus for Singer's vegetarianism does not stem from Kashrut it would be remiss not to point out that this connection between meat and female blood owes something to the prohibition on consuming blood found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy; the traditional requirement of shechita (ritual slaughter) is that blood of the carcass be fully drained. The abundance of female blood in Singer's stories is a way of emphasizing their “unclean” and prohibited status.
72 Hughes, Ted, “The Genius of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” New York Review of Books, 4, 6 (22 April 1965)Google Scholar, n.p., available at www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/04/22/the-genius-of-isaac-bashevis-singer.
73 Singer, “Blood,” 360.
74 Alexander, Singer: A Study in the Short Fiction, 60–61.
75 Immanuel Kant, quoted in Midgley, Beast and Man, 42. Commenting on Kant's suggestion, Midgley wonders, “how can there be such a danger? … The point might be that beasts give more time and attention to sex than people, or are more promiscuous. But even if this were true, it would not alone show that they were wrong to do so, or that people would be wrong to imitate them – not unless one had shown separately that animals always were wrong, or that people should never imitate them.” Midgley, 45.
76 Singer, “Blood,” 361.
77 Ibid., 366.
78 Hadda draws on the testimony of one of Singer's female translators to make this point. Hadda, Singer: A Life, 159.
79 Spilka, “Deadly Pleasures,” 332.
80 Prescott, Peter S., “Singer the Magician,” Newsweek, 92 (6 Oct. 1978), 97Google Scholar.
81 In his presentation at the Nobel Prize Banquet Singer utilized material from an earlier piece called “Why I Write for Children,” explaining, “Children read books, not reviews … They don't read to free themselves of guilt … they have no use for psychology … They detest sociology … When a book is boring, they yawn openly … They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.” Quoted in Hadda, 157, ellipses in original.
82 Several critics have noted the influence on Singer of Schopenhauer. Of those drawn on here see Beck, “I. B. Singer's Misogyny,” 34; Alexander, Singer: The Short Fiction, 57, 61; Spilka, 339–41.
83 Gerhardt, Christina, “Thinking With: Animals in Schopenhauer, Horkheimer, and Adorno,” in Sanbonmatsu, John, ed., Critical Theory and Animal Liberation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 137–46, 143Google Scholar.
84 Ibid.,142.
85 Singer, “The Yiddish Writer in America,” 41; Schopenhauer, “On Women.”
86 Three of Singer's novels were published in English posthumously: The Certificate (1992); Meshugah (1994); Shadows on the Hudson (1998). Scum (1991) was published in English three months before Singer's death. Except for Meshugah, all had been published serially in Yiddish in Forverts some years before Shosha and The Penitent (Scum and The Certificate in 1967, as Shoym and Der sertifikat respectively; Meshugah as Farloyrene neshomes (Lost Souls) in 1981; Shadows on the Hudson as Shotyns baym Hodson in 1957–58.) There was less of a publication gap for both Shosha and The Penitent, which were serialized in 1974 and 1973, as Neshome-exspeditsyes (Soul Expeditions) and Der bal-tshuve respectively. See Saltzman, Roberta, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Bibliography of His Works in Yiddish and English, 1960–1991 (London and Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Since Singer tended to work on more than one book at a time, and since there are such overlaps in his writing – particularly those later novels (to wit, Aaron Greidinger is the name of the central character in both Shosha and Meshugah) – it is impossible to establish definitively the order in which his books were written.
87 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, Shosha (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), 73–74Google Scholar.
88 Singer, The Penitent, 39.
89 Ibid., 132–35. Singer suggests in Love and Exile that none of the other passengers wanted anything to do with him after his pronouncement of vegetarianism on the boat from Cherbourg to New York: “I had committed the sin of isolating myself from others,” he writes, “and I had been excommunicated.” Singer, Love and Exile, 236.
90 Harold Bloom, “Isaac Bashevis Singer's Jeremiad,” New York Times, 25 Sept. 1983, 3, available at www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/25/home/singer-penitent.html.
91 Singer, “The Yiddish Writer in America,” 41.
92 Calarco, Zoographies, 42. In What Is Posthhumanism? Cary Wolfe distinguishes this kind of posthumanism from the “cyborg” posthumanism of Donna Haraway, and from its inheritor, “transhumanism,” the roots of which lie in Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment notions of perfectability. Wolfe writes that the point is “not to reject humanism tout court, but to show how [its] aspirations are undercut by the philosophical and ethical frameworks used to conceptualize them. The philosophical and theoretical frameworks used by humanism … reproduce the very kind of normative subjectivity – a specific concept of the human – that grounds discrimination against nonhuman animals and the disabled in the first place.” Wolfe, Cary, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xviiGoogle Scholar. Singer's critique of humanism is based on the same reasoning, and his sweeping repudiation of it is a fictional gambit born from frustration and the desire for didactic cogency. Gaita outlines “creatureliness” in The Philosopher's Dog (Oxford: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar.