In My Father's Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer

First published:Mayn Tatn’s Bes-din Shtub, 1956 (English translation, 1966)

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: Leoncin, Warsaw, and Bilgoray, Poland

Principal Personages:

• Isaac Bashevis Singer, the author, a young boy growing up in Warsaw
• Pinhos-Mendel Singer, Isaac’s father
• Bathsheba Singer, Isaac’s mother
• Israel Joshua Singer, Isaac’s older brother
• Moishe Singer, Isaac’s younger brother

Form and Content

In My Father’s Court is the first of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s three volumes of memoirs, published over a span of nearly two decades. Taken together they comprise a record not only of the surface facts of Singer’s life, from his formative years in Poland through his period of adjustment to a new life in the United States during the mid-1930’s, but of his inner life as well. Although Singer includes bits of family history, such as the marriage of his parents, which predate his own birth, the bulk of In My Father’s Court chronicles his boyhood and early adolescence, culminating in his first stirrings of sexual desire at the age of fifteen. While much of A Young Man in Search of Love (1978) is concerned with its author’s many sexual adventures, Singer also tells about the early strivings for artistic expression that led to his first novel, Sotan in Goray (1935; Satan in Goray, 1955). This second volume of memoirs ends with Singer’s decision to emigrate to the United States in 1955. Lost in America (1980) takes up the story immediately after his arrival and recounts the loneliness, alienation, poverty, and writer’s block of his first years in the United States, years of nearly suicidal despair that constituted the darkest period of Singer’s life.

As is his custom in most of his fiction and nonfiction, Singer prefaces In My Father’s Court with a note in which he speaks of the genesis and purpose of the work. The idea of writing his recollections of his father’s rabbinic court (beth din), which had been with him from early youth, first took published form as a series in the Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish-language periodical in which most of Singer’s work is originally serialized. Written under the byline of Isaac Warshawsky, his journalistic pseudonym, the series was released in book form under his real name (a signal that it is to be taken seriously) because its pieces added up to a portrait of “a life and environment that no longer exist and are unique.” To preserve the memory of a people and a world is the stated purpose of nearly all Singer’s writing. This explains his habitual literary strategy of turning his Yiddish serials, directed to the shrinking readership of the Jewish Daily Forward, into the more permanent form of English books with vast potential circulation.

Despite its familiar aim and subject matter, In My Father’s Court is viewed as

in a certain sense a literary experiment. It is an attempt to combine two styles—that of memoirs and that of belles-lettres—and its approach to description and its manner of conveying situations differ from those used in my other writings.

The 307 pages of In My Father’s Court are divided into forty-nine vignettes, each ranging from five to eight pages. While the organization is loosely chronological, it is at the same time deliberately episodic, shaped as often by its boyish narrator’s random recollections as by the strict order of its events. Although its first-person narrative is largely confined to young Isaac’s immediate field of perception, In My Father’s Court also contains references to events prior to his birth as well as the mature author’s reflections upon the significance of what his youthful persona has witnessed. The controlling presence of this omniscient author is everywhere apparent. Singer attempts to mimic neither childish behavior nor childish diction. No matter the narrator’s age, his voice is generally that of a mature observer and recorder.

Critical Context

As an autobiographical memoir, In My Father’s Court paints the familiar portrait of the physical and intellectual development of a sensitive and observant youth. Because Singer’s novels and stories are frequently thinly veiled treatments of identical subject matter, In My Father’s Court may be read as a valuable source of the “real” facts behind the fictions. Asa Heshel Bannet’s fascination with Spinoza in Die Familie Moskat (1950; The Family Moskat, 1950) and Aaron Greidinger’s Krochmalna Street address in Neshome Ekspeditsyes (1974; Shosha, 1978) are but two among the many examples of Singer’s protagonists taking on the attributes of their creator.

Yet without denying its importance as a record of Singer’s formative years and thus of the people, the places, and the ideas that shape his fiction, In My Father’s Court is chiefly valuable—at least for Singer himself—as a work of remembrance. In the wake of Adolf Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry, those who lived through the Holocaust dedicated themselves to what they considered a sacred duty: to preserve the history of their people. For concentration camp survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, this meant creating a permanent record of the atrocities they had witnessed. For Singer, who emigrated to the United States well before the German invasion of Poland, it meant reanimating the lost world of pre-1939 East European Jewry. Indeed Singer’s works, including In My Father’s Court, can be read as chapters in the history of his people from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Even in those works which treat events relatively remote from the Holocaust, that overwhelming fact of Jewish history is never far below the surface. Although the action of In My Father’s Court halts in 1918, for example, the memoir is peppered with phrases such as “the only one to survive the Nazi holocaust” and “I do not know whether he lived to see the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.” The latter phrase occurs at the end of the episode entitled “Reb Asher the Dairyman” and refers to the title character, a close friend of Singer’s father and one who helped the Singers in every way he could during the World War I years when the family was on the brink of starvation. The chapter’s concluding sentence constitutes Singer’s most explicit definition of the purpose of In My Father’s Court—and of his work in general: “May these memoirs serve as a monument to him [Asher] and his like, who lived in sanctity and died as martyrs.”

Bibliography

Alexander, Edward. Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1980.

Allentuck, Marcia, ed. The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1969.

Buchen, Irving H. Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past, 1968.

Friedman, Lawrence S. Understanding Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1988.

Kresh, Paul. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street, 1979.

Malin, Irving. Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1972.

Malin, Irving, ed. Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1969.

Sinclair, Clive. The Brothers Singer, 1983.