Less Than Heroic

Managed to move away from the heavy-handed heroics of Ivanhoe over the weekend to a bit of Semitic writing - Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Seance and Other Stories, the only thing I've got by the Yiddish master, oddly, considering the enormously high regard in which I hold him. Scott had me completely baffled by his attitude to his Jewish characters. Clearly the completely unbelievable Rebecca is intended as a tribute to the nobility of her people and Scott deserves credit for the positive nature of her characterisation, but the problem is that she is unbelievable whilst her highly fallible father is precisely that: fallible, in what Scott seems to imply is a particularly Jewish manner. I reckon that Scott's pair are a sort of poor man's Shylock and Jessica, a sort of literary version of the chosen people. They don't really live for a moment.

Singer's version of the chosen people is, in contrast, all humanity despite the sense of complete verisimilitude about their Jewishness. It's the endearing weakness of his characters that gives Singer his strength. The segment of the final story in the collection, The Letter Writer, in which the protagonist recovering from a bout of pneumonia worries about the fate of a mouse that he'd previously been taking care and sees the human treatment of all animals as another kind of Treblinka should have been silly yet, for this reader, was incredibly powerful. (And I'm talking about that deeply unfashionable notion of moral power here.)