Another look at spirituality in the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Let's think about the spiritual elements in Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories in a different way: perhaps they are not meant to be like magic realism (something out of the realm of the ordinary or probable but presented in such as way as to be matter of fact and accepted within its context, thereby not contradicting realism but expanding its parameters) and not like primitivism (an element of a native culture, in this case the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe, that the author obviously does not find credible or purposeful but that he presents as an endemic element to the life of the culture he's portraying) but rather a code or a series of signs: the people in the shtetls experience the same vagaries and infidelities and cruelties and sentimentality in their circumscribed life - a set-apart village with only a 100 or so families, largely cut off from the rest of the world - as we do today in urban, interconnected life but they don't have a vocabulary in which to explain these shifts in emotion or behavior; they don't have the Freudian terminology, for example, that we use to explain or explain away much antisocial behavior, nor do they have a medical or sociological terminology - the code they use to examine and explain their lives is the code of mysticism. For example, in the story about the young scholar (Zeidlus the Pope - had to pause to look it up but I was right) who converts to Christianity because he has visions of the grandeur that would ensue if he were to rise to the position of pope: there could be lots of reasons for this strange and deluded behavior, narcissism, borderline personality, delusions, self-loathing, anti-Semitism, lack of sexual gratification, hatred of parents for making him a scholar (think how Kafka would have presented this story), desire to escape the tiny community, and so forth. But Singer portrays it as a possession: a spirit tries to capture his soul by leading him to temptation and seduces him through his one personality flaw, vanity. Though spiritualism in part functions as a convenient plot generator for Singer, it's also no doubt an accurate portrayal of how his characters think of their world: why would a young Jewish scholar convert to Christianity? His soul must be possessed by a devilish spirit, there's no other explanation. Or, more precisely, there is no code, no set of signs or symbols, by which they can explain the aberrations in their world