Shop Talk by Philip Roth Page B

spoke Polish brought up their children in this way. Whether it was good or bad I don't know.

But since Polish was, so to say, his mother tongue, Schulz had no choice, since a real writer will write not in a learned language but in the language he knows from his childhood. And Schulz's strength, of course, is in the language. I read him first in English, and though the translation is a good one, when I read him later in Polish I saw this strength very clearly.
    Roth: Schulz was born of Jewish parents in Poland in 1892. You were born in 1904. Was it unusual for a Polish Jew of that generation to write in Polish, or to write in Yiddish, as you did?
    Singer: The Jews had a number of important writers who wrote in Polish, and all of them were born more or less at this time, in the 1890s. Antoni Slonimski, Julian Tuwim, Józef Wittlin—all these writers were about this age. They were good writers, talented writers, but nothing special. Some of them, however, were very strong in the Polish language. Tuwim was a master of Polish. Slonimski was a grandson of Chaim Zelig Slonimski, who was the founder of the Hebrew newspaper
Hatsefira
in Warsaw. Slonimski was converted to Catholicism by his parents when he was a child, while Tuwim and Wittlin remained Jews, though Jews only in name. They had very little to do with Yiddish writers. My older brother, Israel Joshua Singer, was born more or less at the same time and was a known Yiddish writer in Poland and had no association with either of these writers. I was still a beginner, in Poland, and I certainly had nothing to do with them. We Yiddish writers looked at them as people who had left their roots and culture and become a part of Polish culture, which we considered younger and perhaps less important than our culture. They felt that we Yiddish writers were writing for ignorant

people, poor people, people without education, while they were writing for readers who went to universities. So we both had a good reason to despise each other. Though the truth is, they had no choice and we had no choice. They didn't know Yiddish, we didn't know Polish. Although I was born in Poland, Polish was not as close to me as Yiddish. And I spoke it with an accent. As a matter of fact, I speak all languages with an accent.
    Roth: Not Yiddish, I take it.
    Singer: Yes. The Litvaks say I speak Yiddish with an accent.
    Roth: I want to ask you about Warsaw in the thirties. Schulz studied architecture in Lwów as a young man, and then, as far as I know, he returned to the Galician town of Drohobycz, where for the rest of his life he taught drawing in the high school. He did not leave Drohobycz for any significant length of time until his middle or late thirties, when he came to Warsaw. What kind of cultural atmosphere would he have found in Warsaw then?
    Singer: There are two things to remember about Schulz. First of all, he was a terribly modest person. The very fact that he stayed in this town, which was far away from the center of everything, shows that he was highly modest, and also kind of afraid. He felt like a yokel who's afraid to come to the big city and to meet people who are already famous. He was afraid, most probably, that they would make fun of him or they would ignore him. I think this man was a bundle of nerves. He suffered from all the inhibitions that a writer can suffer. When you look at his picture you see the face of a man who never made peace with life. Tell me, Mr. Roth, he was not married. Did he have some girlfriends?
    Roth: If his drawings are any indication, I would think he

had strange relations with women. A recurring subject in the drawings that I've seen is female dominance and male submission. There is an eerie, almost tawdry erotic suggestiveness to some of these pictures—small, supplicating men looking not unlike Schulz himself and remote, half-naked adolescent girls or statuesque, painted shopgirls. They remind me a little of the "trashy" erotic world of