September
2004
Vegetarian
Advocate: Isaac Bashevis Singer: Vegetarian Extraordinaire
By Jack Rosenberger
|
The year is 1988. Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer
is 84 years old and in failing health. His only child, Israel Zamir,
almost 60,
visits Isaac and Alma, his second wife, in New York and is troubled
by his father’s condition. As Israel writes in his memoir, Journey
to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer: “A special watch to measure
his pulse was attached to his wrist. He wore sneakers with velcro fasteners.
His once blue eyes were dark. One of them had recently been operated
on, and he was still in pain. About a year before, his prostate had
been removed. When he was in severe pain, he would explode in a fit
of rage and shift his body around, seeking some relief.”
Isaac, Alma, and Israel leave the Singer apartment on West 86th Street
to eat
dinner at a nearby restaurant. Isaac orders “his standard vegetarian dinner,
which consisted of spinach cutlets, potatoes and vegetable soup,” notes
Israel, and quickly commences to talking about vegetarianism. “My father
was connecting animal slaughter with human bloodshed and the lack of peace on
earth. ‘There’s only one step between “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou
shalt not slaughter,”’ he said. He kept pleading with me over and
over to become a vegetarian.”
Singer’s health worsened. He was beset with Alzheimer’s disease during
the last several years of his life, and died in 1991. Israel never became a vegetarian.
This year marks Singer’s centennial, and a flurry of celebrations across
America are celebrating the Polish-born author’s life and work. The son
of a rabbi, Singer is popularly known as a prolific author who wrote in Yiddish,
penning at least 10 short story collections and 14 novels in addition to numerous
books for children, and as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.
What biographers, critics, and journalists often refuse to acknowledge about
Singer is how important vegetarianism was to him. In his personal and professional
lives. Singer often spoke with public audiences, friends and acquaintances, and
journalists about being vegetarian, and his fiction increasingly featured a vegetarian
point of view. (As Singer’s career progressed, his narrators and protagonists
tended to be male, Jewish, and vegetarian.) Indeed, years before PETA became
a household name, Isaac Bashevis Singer was one of America’s most outspoken
advocates of vegetarianism and animal protection.
A Vegetarian Latecomer
Singer was a late convert to vegetarianism, not becoming one until he was, according
to one biographer, almost 60 years old. While Singer was a near-vegetarian for
many years, the principal reason why Singer did not become a vegetarian earlier
is partly due to his parents’ opposition. As the Nobel laureate revealed
in Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer: “I really feel that sensitive
people, people who think about things, must come to the conclusion that you cannot
be gentle while you’re killing a creature, you cannot be for justice while
you take a creature which is weaker than you and slaughter it, and torture it.
I’ve had this feeling since I was a child and many children have it. But
somehow my parents told me that this means that I am trying to have more compassion
than the Almighty. My mother told me that if I become a vegetarian I will die
from hunger, from malnutrition. So I was afraid, I said, ‘Well, what can
I do?’ But at another stage of my life, about 20 years ago, I felt that
I would be a real hypocrite if I would write or speak against bloodshed while
I would be shedding blood myself... It is just common sense to me that if you
believe in compassion and in justice you cannot treat animals the very opposite
simply because they are weaker or because they have less intelligence.”
As in the above interview, Singer felt compelled to speak about his vegetarianism
and against cruelty to animals, especially farmed animals. In explaining why
he was a vegetarian, Singer usually said something along the lines of “I
am a vegetarian for the sake of health—the health of the chicken!” In
addition, Singer promoted vegetarianism whenever he could, writing the preface
to Stephen Rosen’s Food for the Spirit, Vegetarianism and the World
Religions,
in which he declared “I will continue to be a vegetarian even if the whole
world started to eat meat,” and contributing interviews and recipes to
Rynn Berry’s books The New Vegetarians and Famous Vegetarians
and Their
Favorite Recipes. In the latter book, Singer declared: “I think that everything
connected with vegetarianism is of the highest importance because there will
never be any peace in the world so long as we eat animals. This also applies
to fish. I do not eat any fish. I had felt guilty and ashamed about the fact
that I had eaten the flesh of an animal. I think that animals are as much God’s
creatures as men are. And we have to respect and love them, not slaughter them.”
Singer frequently wrote about vegetarianism and the relationship between human
and nonhuman animals in his fiction, and it is amongst the most powerful and
thoughtful literary writing on the two subjects. In Enemies: A Love Story,
the
protagonist, Herman, visits a zoo. His impressions? “Herman often compared
the zoo to a concentration camp. The air here was full of longing—for deserts,
hills, valleys, dens, families. Like the Jews, the animals had been dragged here
from all parts of the world, condemned to isolation and boredom. Some of them
cried out their woes; others remained mute.”
Later in the same novel, Singer writes: “The birds had announced the new
day as if it were the morning after creation. Warm breezes carried the scent
of the woods and the smell of food being prepared in the hotels. Herman imagined
he heard the screech of a chicken or a duck. Somewhere on this lovely summer
morning, fowl were being slaughtered; Treblinka was everywhere.”
Likewise, in The Penitent, the narrator, Joseph Shapiro, takes a seat
in a restaurant
and reflects: “The waitress came and I ordered breakfast. I watched someone
at the next table working away at his plate of ham with eggs. I had long since
come to the conclusion that man’s treatment of God’s creatures makes
mockery of all his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. In order for this
overstuffed individual to enjoy his ham, a living creature had to be raised,
dragged to its death, stabbed, tortured, scalded in hot water. The man didn’t
give a second’s thought to the fact that the pig was made of the same stuff
as he and that it had to pay with suffering and death so that he could taste
its flesh. I’ve thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every
man is a Nazi. Yes, I had always felt these things, but that morning they literally
hit me on the head like a hammer. That morning I realized for the first time
what a horrible hypocrite I was.”
Soon, Shapiro decides to become a vegetarian. “For me, thou shalt not kill
includes animals, too. I managed to persuade my present wife to my way of thinking.
We are a family of vegetarians.”
Or as the narrator in “The Admirer,” a short story, says: “We
sat at a card table, facing each other like a married couple. A cockroach crawled
across the table, but neither Elizabeth nor I made any effort to disturb it.
The cockroaches in my apartment apparently knew that I was a vegetarian and that
I felt no hatred for their species, which is a few hundred million years older
than man and which will survive him.”
Vegetarian, What Vegetarian?
Unfortunately, despite Singer’s vegetarian lifestyle, his outspoken advocacy
of vegetarianism, and its presence in his fiction, journalists, critics and biographers
tend to slight or ignore it. When Singer died, the New York Times noted
his passing
with an obituary on the front page. Singer’s obit continued inside the
newspaper and filled nearly an entire page. The discussion of Singer’s
vegetarianism was confined to a single sentence: “Even his own vegetarianism
he saw in a humorous light; it was he explained, (not for my health, but for
the health of the chickens.) To say that Singer approached vegetarianism as a
humorous topic is a frightening misreading of his life and work.
Likewise, a recent New Yorker article on Singer by Jonathan Rosen devoted
more
than five pages of text to Singer’s life and literary oeuvre; Rosen’s
discussion of Singer’s vegetarianism was limited to 12 words.
Apparently, Israel Zamir never followed his father’s pleadings to become
a vegetarian. If he had, the vegetarian community would be blessed with a blood
relative who understood Singer’s vegetarianism. If you are unfamiliar with
Singer’s fiction, pick up Enemies: A Love Story, The Penitent, and Meshugah,
all of which are vegetarian-themed novels. Also, the next time you are discussing
books with your vegan and vegetarian friends, do I.B. Singer a favor and recommend
his book to them. Lastly, when you read articles, such as the ones previously
mentioned, set the record straight and write a letter to the editor.
 |
|
|
 |
