Remembering My Neighbor - Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) and I were neighbors for many years. He lived in the Belnord on Broadway and 86th Street (since designated by the city as "Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard"), while I have lived at West End Avenue and 86th Street for the past 28 years.

Although I never met him in person, I did hear him speak once and occasionally spotted him having breakfast with his wife at the American Restaurant at the corner of 85th Street or feeding pigeons on Broadway--one of his favorite activities.

I did not find out he was a vegetarian and animal advocate, not to mention the most powerful pro-animal voice in modern literature, until after his death in 1991 when I read his stories, novels, and interviews as part of my research for my book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust.

The mistreatment of animals Singer saw around him growing up in Poland upset him greatly. One of his earliest memories was of an animal in his village being abused. "Every week there was a market, and many peasants would come to the town bringing livestock. Once I saw a peasant beating a pig. Maybe it had been squealing. I ran in to my mother to tell her the pig was crying and the man was beating it with a stick. I remember this very vividly. Even then I was thinking like a vegetarian."

He thought that there should be an Eleventh Commandment: "Do not kill or exploit the animal. Don't eat its flesh, don't flail its hide, don't force it to do things against its nature."

Although he was able to leave Warsaw and follow his older brother Joshua to the United States in 1935, his mother, younger brother, and many members of his extended family in Poland were killed by the Germans. While Singer did not write about the Holocaust directly, it was the ever present lens through which he viewed the world, especially when it came to the killing of animals.

In his apartment at the Belnord he kept a pair of parakeets and left the door of their cage open so they could fly around freely. "These birds loved each other and loved Isaac, and he loved them," wrote Singer's biographer. "They would sit on his head or his knee and coo. He would speak soft words to them in Yiddish or English."

Dorothea Straus, the wife of Singer's publisher, described the scene when he would go out and feed the pigeons: "The birds cluster near him without fear, and he watches their minute flutterings and peckings with something close to love in his large, blue eyes. Only God knows what these creatures are feeling, he says to himself. The pigeons have found a friend, and Isaac Singer, in their midst, is not alone."

Animals suffer as much as humans do, he insisted. "Their emotions and their sensitivity are often stronger than those of a human being. Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal--be it a dog, bird or even a mouse--knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty."

He warned that as long as human beings go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be peace. "There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is."

Singer was the first major writer in modern literature to employ the Holocaust analogy to describe the exploitation and slaughter of animals (another Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee, was the second). In Singer's short story--"The Letter Writer"--a Holocaust survivor who lives alone in New York befriends a mouse whom he names Huldah. He leaves milk and cheese out for her at night, but then he becomes ill and cannot feed her any more. Later after the worst of his illness is over and he begins to recover, he fears she is dead and consoles himself that she is no longer hungry, thirsty, or sick, but is at one with God.

In a mental whisper he speaks a eulogy for the mouse Huldah who had shared a portion of her life with him: "What do they know--all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world--about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

I dedicated my book Eternal Treblinka to Singer's memory, for in many ways it is more his book than mine. As far as I'm concerned, he said it all. I merely came along and filled in the details.