Two decades later, Israel Joshua had become the “other” Singer, whose existence even fans of Isaac were often surprised to learn about. That remains the case today. But a new edition of I. J. Singer’s work has now gathered six of his books—five novels and a memoir—in two omnibus volumes, each more than a thousand pages. Edited by Anita Norich, a Yiddish-literature scholar who provides introductions and an extensive bibliography, the edition marks the first time that some of I. J. Singer’s books have been in print in decades—in the case of one novel, “East of Eden,” for the first time since its original publication, more than eighty years ago. The publisher is the Library of the Jewish People, a new venture that aims to do for Jewish literature what the Library of America does for American classics. (I. B. Singer, meanwhile, is in the Library of America itself.)
The difference in the brothers’ reputations is partly due to the fact that the younger Singer outlived the elder by nearly half a century, dying in 1991. But even while both brothers were alive they effectively belonged to different literary generations. (They were born a decade apart—Israel Joshua in 1893, Isaac in 1904.) I. J. Singer emerged as a writer in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and he used fiction to explore the political and economic forces that were uprooting Jewish life in Eastern Europe. His first novel, “Steel and Iron” (1927), follows a Jewish soldier who deserts the tsarist Army during the First World War, becomes a Communist, and ends up helping to storm the Winter Palace—the decisive episode in the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. In later books, Singer dramatized the betrayal of Communist hopes by Stalin and the plight of German Jews under Hitler.
“The Brothers Ashkenazi,” his best-remembered book, is a family saga about the rivalry between twin brothers, one a ferociously ambitious businessman and the other a charming idler. But Singer is less interested in family dynamics than in the evolution of Jewish life in the Polish city of Lodz, a center of the textile trade, amid the pressures of industrial capitalism, rising nationalism and Communism, and the devastation of the First World War. His great strength as a novelist is in depicting how individuals’ fates reflect the movement of history, and his most characteristic passages deal in plurals, as in this description of a credit-fuelled market bubble in Lodz: