Dylan Skolnick L&S Arts & Humanities
Beyond Survival: Late Style in Isaac Bashevis Singer after the Shoah
From the beginning, Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was already ‘late.’ This is ‘late’ as defined by Edward Said in his book On Late Style. Said writes that a change occurs in artists once they reach a stage in their life where death becomes extra-present. They begin to abrogate norms and create works which “kee[p] the irreconcilable apart.”” But for Singer, death was always already present. His first novel, Satan in Goray, published in 1933, focuses on the Khmelnytsky pogroms, the largest mass murder of Jews in Europe before the Shoah.
My project will compare Satan in Goray with Singer’s first post-Holocaust novel Shadows on the Hudson to understand what, if any, changes an already-late writer can make when even the death they thought they knew surprised them. This will help to expand our understanding of late style as it applies to oppressed, already-late, groups and further scholarship on an understudied work from one of Yiddish literature’s most important writers. Ultimately, I hope to answer the question of how we (ethically) continue after catastrophe and what role art plays in this.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you for providing me the opportunity to delve deeply into this subject which is so important to me, I believe and hope to show, our current world. Singer's work, and especially his post-Shoah novels, have obsessed me since I first picked them up. I feel very priviliged to be given a chance to produce something meaningful about this writer and this Yiddish culture, which has given the world so much... even if much of it is now forgotten.