Published nearly a year and a half after Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt (translated by David Stromberg), the newest collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s essays, A Spiritual Reappraisal, is just that — a blunt and fervent analysis of the spiritual realities of American Jews post-WWII. If Singer’s first collection was a call to action, his second installment of essays is a reprimand tinged with disappointment and frustration. And understandably so — in the decade following the Second World War, Jews around the world were forced to contend with the destruction of European Jewish life and how that would affect the collective Jewish identity. Singer sorts through the cultural ruins of his homeland and desperately tries to preserve them in his new home, where he can already see the Jewish world disappearing. Whereas he was saddened in his first collection, he now seems depleted, angry at a world that he believes no longer cares about being Jewish .
Religion, Singer argues, is the foundation of all Jewish life. Culture — literature, art, language — matters greatly, but begins to lose meaning without religion and spirituality at its core. Spirituality in this case is not just prayer or belief in God, but also engagement with the unique messages and meanings within Judaism itself. Singer, who had always been a proponent of the Yiddish language, sees it as a bridge to a deeper understanding of Jewishness. As translator David Stromberg writes in the introduction, “His vision for the survival of Yiddish is not merely practical but mainly spiritual: he wants to ensure not only that it will be possible to learn Yiddish but that people will want to learn it so they can gain access to its treasures.”
These treasures, however, are described by Singer in an incredibly religious way; one that feels somewhat out of character for the typically-secular Yiddish writers of his time. Apart from referencing the literary and spiritual virtues of the Tanakh, Singer goes on to judge the world by delineations of good and evil, emphasizing a goal of repentance. It is fascinating to see repentance in the context of preserving the Yiddish language. Singer’s religiosity, something that was not as apparent in his wartime essays, shapes how he sees the post-Holocaust world and the people living in it.
Singer writes from a moment when secular Judaism was gaining momentum. Jews were fracturing into political factions, assimilating into Western culture, and dropping traditional Jewish customs. Singer didn’t believe that a “secular Yiddish culture” was possible — he found it empty and devoid of meaning. In his essays, he seems nearly disgusted at the state of Jewish life in America post-World War II.
Singer uses a collective we that is an admonishment of the entire Jewish community, roping the majority of American Jews into Singer’s perception of Judaism’s downfall. Modernism and assimilation have often been viewed as obstacles to Jewish tradition, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially. Was the most therapeutic response to the Holocaust to look backwards? Or was it to move forwards, leaning into assimilation, as many American Jews were? This is always the question within discussions of the Jewish world, and it is unlikely to be answered, even by someone as prolific as Singer.
“Modern Jewishness is as full of contradictions as pomegranates are filled with seeds,” writes Singer. But perhaps one of the most beautiful parts of Judaism is its ability to hold all of these contradictions and still continue to evolve in our modern world. If there is a third installment of Singer’s essays in the works, it will be interesting to see if he later came to appreciate the contradictions of modern Jewry, to relish in the changes as one would the sweet juice hidden within the pomegranate seeds.
Isadora Kianovsky (she/her) is the Membership & Engagement Associate at Jewish Book Council. She graduated from Smith College in 2023 with a B.A. in Jewish Studies and a minor in History. Prior to working at JBC, she focused on Gender and Sexuality Studies through a Jewish lens with internships at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Jewish Women’s Archive. Isadora has also studied abroad a few times, traveling to Spain, Israel, Poland, and Lithuania to study Jewish history, literature, and a bit of Yiddish language.
