Scum

Isaac Bashevis Singer's Scum is a tale of a 47 year old successful business man, thief and fornicator who hid many of his business deals and money and sex liaisons from his wife, who was his partner. Their son, a teen-ager dies unexpectantly. His wife falls into a deep depression, becomes frigid, and is unable to have a close relationship with him. While he thinks that he is not depressed, he becomes impotent and suffers for several years feeling that he has no enjoyment from his life. He decides to rekindle his zest for life by returning to the ultra-Orthodox Judaism of his youth, beginning with his return to his birthplace Poland and a visit to his parents' graves. He arrives in Poland in 1906 and is drawn to the thieves' quarter where he discovers two kinds of Jews, the ultra-Orthodox and the unreligious and secular minded criminal class. The former are overwhelmed by piety, study of the Talmud and prayer; the latter by sex. He makes several attempts to overcome his impotency and to find satisfaction. He becomes involved with five different women, each in a despicable way. He is charmed by the daughter of an extremely poor rabbi and offers her marriage. The girl is young enough to be his daughter. He tries to rape a servant girl to regain his potency. He joins with a woman who is unfaithful to her lover, who is a married man, in an enterprise to seduce or kidnap girls from Poland and take them to his country, Argentina, and place them in a brothel. He has sex with her and thinks that he recovered his potency. He seeks help from a clearly fraudulent clairvoyant to see his dead son and decides to help her escape from a man who is controlling her. The story, as many written by the Nobel Prize Winner I. B. Singer, can be read as a parable of man's search for meaning and how he is hindered in his search by his failure to realize that he is searching for meaning, his inability to maintain focus on his goal and his failure to abandon his nature, in this case being scum.

Singer (and his translator) manages with beautiful, easy-to-read prose, to evoke a lost world. His sketches of the the people and places in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw c 1906 are memorable and convincing. While I was reading the book I was conscious that the city was flattened in the 1940s and 6/7 of Polish Jews were murdered during the Nazi occupation - i.e. a stark dark line through history cut Max's world off from from today's Poland. Max recalls the assimilated, Spanish speaking Jewish community in Argentina and the ultra-conservative village in Western Poland where he grew up - and to which he is forever planning to return. He observes the pious Warsaw families in their detailed preparations for and observation of the Sabbath - but also the other Jews, the thieves, pimps, whores who live in the same street, and the middle class Jews in their large apartments a few blocks away. This multi-layered community speaks a different language from the millions of Poles that surround them and is loathed by many of the hosts. Singer makes occasional refererence to the pogroms, anti-Semitism, the Russian occupation, but it is not an overtly political novel. It concentrates on the the street life in the ghetto and specifically on the character of Max. Manic mad Max can't help getting into trouble. He lurches from one messy encounter to the next, creating new dangers for himself even before the previous one has been resolved. He has a wife in Argentina, yet promises himself to several Warsaw women in his first few days in the city. His treatment of women is appalling, yet by highlighting his protagonist's self-awareness, self-loathing, his profound grief over his lost son, his occasional moments of kindness, his guilt and conscience, Singer will endear his extraordinary creation to many readers. Max is deeply lonely and Singer explains much of his bizarre behaviour with reference to his desperate need to avoid being alone with his despair. This is my first Singer novel and I will definitely read others - he creates both a strong multi-dimensional central character and a powerful sense of place with stark, economical prose. A glossary of religious and cultural terms would have been helpful - and a few pages of recipes would have been a treat (although I'll skip the cabbage fried in lard!)