Word: holocaust
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...extolling his own virtues by claiming he has many detractors--like, he implies, many great men. But pride and even whining are easily within the range of emotions Isaac Bashevis Singer explores in Passions, and as he says of Eastern European Jews--both those who were destroyed in the Holocaust and those who survived to come to America--"The longer I live with them and write about them, the more I am baffled by the richness of their individuality and (since I am one of them) by my own whims and passions...
...being Jewish. "Hanka" is the story of a mysterious woman by the same name whom the first-person narrator meets in Argentina. She lived in the ghettoes of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation--saved only by her Gentile lover on the "Aryan side" of the city. Despite surviving the Holocaust, her experience living in a hidden closet, every minute fearing capture and torture, has convinced Hanka that she is dead: "Those who stood at the threshhold of death remain dead," she says...
Throughout these stories the Holocaust has left an indelible impression on the lives of its survivors, even those who escaped its wrath beforehand. So just as the first-person narrator describes a woman's eye in "Sabbath in Portugal" as having "an embarrassment and a modesty which I did not know still existed," and then recalls his first love "whom I had never dared kiss, and who had been shot by the Nazis in 1943," so too, aging Harry Bendiner in "Old Love," thinks himself a fool to believe in God "After what happened to the Jews in Europe...
...Bashevis Singer nothing could be worse than to become obsessed with the Holocaust. In "The Yearning Heifer," a Polish immigrant praises the writer/narrator for his column in the weekly Yiddish paper. "The news is all bad. Hitler this, Hitler that. He should burn like a fire, the bum, the no-good. What does he want from the Jews?" But this passes quickly from the story--as deeply and sincerely as it is felt--so the narrator can talk about his main subject...
Because of this attitude toward the Holocaust--one that acknowledges the scope of its horror and its scars, but one that also recognizes the fact that it is in the past--Bashevis Singer can bring his memory to bear on the very culture the Holocaust helped to destroy. And this is where he's at his very best, when he's describing his first forage outside his home town in the Old Country ("A Tutor in the Village"); or telling about the nicknames given to people in Polish villages, names like Haim Bellybutton, Yekel Cake, Sarah Gossip, Gittel Duck...