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Poster Commentary
"We have to believe in free will. We have no choice."Isaac Bashevis Singer
Poster design:Asaf Hanuka

Commentary by Aaron Lansky

As his quote on free will suggests, Singer reveled in paradox. Although he broke from religious tradition at an early age, he never stopped writing about Jewish life in the Poland of his youth. And although he filled his books with depictions of sexuality and desire, his intent was not to titillate but to plumb the limits of reason unmoored from religious law.

Singer’s first novel, Satan in Goray, was published in 1935, when many Jews were swept up in radical political movements. Its plot, about the upheaval unleashed by a false messiah in a 17th-century shtetl, was an implicit critique of the failure of redemptive ideologies in his own time.

In The Magician of Lublin, published in 1960, the title character lives by his own moral compass and juggles numerous affairs until he loses his balance and comes perilously close to murder. He then walls himself off from the world to pursue a life of study and prayer. “The Holy Books led to virtue and eternal life, while that which lay behind him was evil. There was no middle road. A single step away from God plunged one into the deepest abyss.”

With an eye for paradox and a gift for evocative detail, Singer became one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, he credited the language in which he wrote: “Yiddish has not yet said its last word. Rich in humor and in memories, it is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.”

Aaron Lansky is founder and president of the Yiddish Book Center. He wrote the bestselling book Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books and received a so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1989.

 

Author
Isaac Bashevis Singer
1902-1991
Poland and U.S.
Writer
  • Born 1902 in Leoncin, Poland – Died 1991 in Surfside, Florida
  • Yiddish author – Wrote novels (The Family Moskat, The Slave, Enemies: A Love Story, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, and others), short story collections (Gimpel the Fool, The Spinoza of Market Street, and others) and children’s stories
  • Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1978 – Most widely read Yiddish writer in the world

“Growing up, my family’s house was on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. One day I stood on the balcony in my satin gabardine and my velvet hat, and gazed about me.  How vast was this world, and how rich in all kinds of people and strange happenings!  And how high was the sky above the rooftops! And how deep the earth beneath the flagstones! And why did men and women love each other? And where was God, who was constantly spoken of in our house? I was amazed, delighted, entranced. I felt that I must solve this riddle, I alone, with my own understanding.”

From Singer’s In My Father’s Court, 1962

 

 

 

 

 

Artist
Asaf Hanuka
Israel
Illustrator
Cartoonist

Asaf Hanuka is an Israeli cartoonist and illustrator. He studied at the French Emile Cohl School of Design and has received prestigious awards, including the Society of Illustrators’ Gold Medal, Communication Arts Award of Excellence, and 3x3 Silver Medal. He collaborated with his twin brother Tomer on the Bipolar comic series and continues to document his own life in the weekly comic series The Realist. Hanuka’s work has appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Source, and The Wall Street Journal.

"I wanted to present Isaac Bashevis Singer as an eternal immigrant, someone who moved into a new culture but somehow managed to stay in his old culture. He is holding a ballerina chest, which represents a long-lost European world of low-tech mechanical magic. But instead of a ballerina there is a klezmer playing the violin, symbolizing the Polish-Jewish village in which many Singer stories are set.

Singer turns the handle. This points to the paradox of free will, expressed in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Ancestors): “Everything is foreseen, and free will is given.”

Some of the music notes are Hebrew letters, because Singer not only wrote in Yiddish (a very musical language) but made Yiddish come alive through stories of a forgotten world – stories that tell us about ourselves today."

 

Quote
"We have to believe in free will. We have no choice."Isaac Bashevis Singer