image by William Pene Dubois at the exhibit "Isaac Bashevis Singer & His Artists" at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh on Tuesday May 15, 2012. Sidney Davis | Tribune-Review

By Kurt Shaw
Tribune-Review

Published: Saturday, May 19, 2012, 3:25 p.m.
Updated: Sunday, May 20, 2012

Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, "A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind." That's a humble statement by a prolific writer who produced 86 books and scores of numerous short stories, not the least of which was a short story titled "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," which became the Broadway play "Yentl."

Long celebrated in his lifetime, Singer (1902-91) is celebrated again (and rightly so) in the exhibit "Isaac Bashevis Singer and His Artists" on display at the American Jewish Museum at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill.

This unique exhibit features more than 80 paintings, drawings and prints created by 17 different artists, including such notable illustrators as Maurice Sendak, Ira Moskowitz and Eric Carle, and works by well-known painters of the fine-art world like Larry Rivers and Raphael Soyer.

Born in Poland around 1903 and educated by his Hasidic rabbi father, Singer immigrated to the United States in 1935 and lived most of his life in New York City before retiring to Surfside, Fla. He won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Fluent in Polish, Hebrew and English, Singer wrote all of his stories in Yiddish.

He referred to the English translations of his works, frequently serialized in newspapers, journals and magazines, as his "second originals."

In fact, he was so fond of the Hebrew language that his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize was made in both Yiddish and English. "He was the first Yiddish writer to win that award," says American Jewish Museum curator Melissa Hiller, who arranged for this exhibit, on loan from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York City.

The exhibit begins with illustrations for Singer's first novel, "Satan in Goray." Moskowitz created a series of prints in 1981 for the book.

"Satan in Goray" was first published in Yiddish in Poland in the 1930s. Set in the small Polish town of Goray "in the middle of the hills, at the end of the world" in the middle years of the 17th-century, it tells the tale of a small population of Jews nearly destroyed by marauding Cossacks. In an effort to recover, they fall victim to a messianic pretender named Sabbatai Zevi, who turns out to be the devil.

The story is based on a theme to which Singer had often returned throughout his career -- the adulation and blind allegiance to a false messiah that, ultimately, fails his people leading them into destitution, then focusing on their penance and quest for ultimate purity.

"Singer was very interested in what man does to destroy himself and to redeem himself," Hiller says. "He used fools and imps, animals and folk tales to reach into the recesses of man's darkness and grasp the reaches with which men are willing to go to save themselves."

Hiller says Singer had a remarkable ability to tap into the rich storehouse of Jewish popular imagination, interweaving everyday life with images culled from collective dreams and nightmares.

This is perhaps best exemplified in a collection of children's stories titled "Zlateh the Goat," which were illustrated by Sendak, who also illustrated the story "Yash the Chimney Sweep" that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968.

Examples on display from both show how Sendak marks his work with an acute interest in fairy-tale imagery, using it as a starting point to expand the reader's imaginary world. Here, traces of the goons and goblins that populate Sendak's world seem to loom large in Singer's tales.

"A lot of the works here are illustrations of children's books," Hiller says, pointing to a series of six illustrations of animals created by Carle, who is best known for his enormously popular story books like "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

Here, Carle brings some levity to the exhibit through six colorful collages created for "Why Noah Chose the Dove," Singer's adaptation of the classic Biblical story of Noah's ark.

Of similar light-hearted ilk, work by William Pene du Bois, another children's book illustrator, captures with delicacy and grace Singer's fantasy tale of "The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China."

"This particular story is about an evil emperor in China who is a tyrant who rules the country by keeping his people confused by doing the exact opposite of what would be the right things to do, such as freeing criminals, etc.," Hiller says. "The emperor has a son who leads a revolution that overturns his father."

Here, delicate pencil drawings by Pene du Bois offer a humorous take on an otherwise horrific tale of adversity and triumph.

Hiller is quick to point out that not all of the stories are meant for children. For example, in Singer's tragi-comic novel "The Magician of Lublin," the central character, a kind of Jewish Don Juan, ends up becoming something of a saint.

Three illustrations by Rivers created to illustrate that novel display a more somber side to Singer's writing, having a more realistic treatment than most of the other illustrations on display.

"Many of Singer's novels delve into themes of evil," Hiller says. "He really believed in evil, exploring evil, sexuality and depravity in a lot of his works."

Thus, it is through works like these that this most-interesting exhibit fleshes out the oeuvre of an important 20th-century writer.<

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