"Let me tell you a story".

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize winner would have turned 100 on July 14, 2004. His short stories and novels are remembered not just for the timeless themes he installed in them, but for the fact that he originally wrote them in Yiddish, considered a dead language. In celebration of Singer’s 100th birthday, The Library of America is publishing his entire short story collection in three volumes. As the Library of America site states "Grandson of two rabbis and son of third, Singer was born Yitskhok Zynger in 1904 in Leoncin, Poland, a small town twenty miles northeast of Warsaw " (from the website at www.ibsinger100.org)

The majority of Singer’s stories and novels draw from his childhood and early manhood on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, Poland, along with his sojourn to his Hassid Rabbi grandfather’s village in Bilgoray, Poland. Singer was a member of the Warsaw Yiddish Writer’s Club which also features strongly in his work, along with his later travels to America, where he was installed as a writer for The Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper.

Singer first attained international acclaim with Gimpel The Fool a short story translated by Saul Bellow for The Paris Review. I have long been a fan of Isaac Bashevis Singer and I read him before he won the Nobel Prize. I found his works to be rich in character insight, humor and pathos, but also with the heartbreaking everyday reality of life thrown in. He seemed to see people as they really were, dybukks or no dybukks.

The everyday jealousies, envy, longing, loneliness and working through poverty and pain, coincided for Singer with the joys of life, the freshness and the hilarity of everyday occurrences. Who else would be able to write, of a Miami Beach based driver who sped him though the streets (my paraphrase) "The Angel of Death, who knew here in Miami I’d find her ". Even in more tragic stories and novels, dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust, as in Enemies, A Love Story, or The Cafeteria Singer’s dry wit shines through.

What compelled this vegetarian mystical droll writer to delineate such detailed stories from his childhood? Would his astrological horoscope show anything to proclaim him as the writer from Krochmalna Street, the astrologer in me wanted to know.

Well, yes. He has a bounty of planets in Cancer, the sign of the home and family and one’s childhood. Singer’s Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Neptune are all in Cancer.

His Chiron is at 27 degrees of Capricorn. This is the same degree it is at the present time, so his Chiron is undergoing a conjunct. Not knowing the exact time of Singer’s birth I did a noon chart since that is the best way to see where the planets are on the day in question. On Singer’s birthday at noon the Moon was at 8 degrees of Leo, so it is likely Leo is where his Moon is located. The Sun, Mercury and Venus are conjunct as are Mars and Neptune. Chiron in Capricorn is opposite the stellium in Cancer of the Sun, Mercury and Venus.

Looking thus at the chart in light of Singer’s great success as a writer and storyteller one can imagine what it must have cost him emotionally to revisit the streets, people and places he once knew and wrote about so vividly, now lost forever. His Mars and Neptune are conjoined so his anger fed his imagination and allowed it to freely castigate all he saw around him in, as noted, a comical, very ironic way at times.

To quote from Singer himself (from the New York Times Archive on Singer‘s Works):

Vanvild Kava, with its glorious opening: "If a Nobel Prize existed for writing little, Vanvild Kava would have gotten it "'

(My favorite) Gimpel the Fool: "The world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world ".

Dr. Margolis, in the story entitled Caricature, reflects bitterly on the verse in Ecclesiastes which tells us that "of making many books there is no end " and comments: "Even then apparently there has been too much scribbling. "

To look at whole paragraphs and to give you the full flavor of Singer’s genius with a pen (or pencil, who knows?):

After market day there is nothing for the storekeepers to do and so they hang around the study house, scratching themselves and leafing through the Talmud or else telling each other amazing stories of monsters and ghosts and werewolves. Obviously in such a town there isn't much for me to do. One is just very hard put to come across a real sin thereabouts. The inhabitants lack both the strength and the inclination.

The Destruction of Kreshev (from The Spinoza of Market Street)

The summer was in full bloom. The fields grew golden, fruit ripened in the orchards. Intoxicating earth aromas induced lassitude and an ethereal calm. "Oh God Almighty, You are the magician, not I!" Yasha whispered. "To bring out plants, flowers and colors from a bit of black soil!"

From The Magician of Lublin

Yes, Isaac please tell us a story. After all you do it so well.