The third vol­ume in Isaac Bashe­vis Singer’s Yid­dish and Yid­dishkayt essay series, trans­lat­ed by David Stromberg, explores all of the essays Singer wrote for the Forverts and oth­er Yid­dish pub­li­ca­tions from 1956 to 1973, syn­the­siz­ing Singer’s thoughts on the state of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture dur­ing that peri­od. The first two vol­umes of this series con­cern Singer’s post­war atti­tude about the impor­tance of Yid­dish and his firm belief that Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture can­not be sec­u­lar, respec­tive­ly. But A Final Reck­on­ing is just that — a dis­sec­tion of Singer’s posi­tion on where Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture was head­ed long-term, and why it mat­tered a great deal when con­sid­er­ing the plight of the Jew­ish people. 

This vol­ume needs the pri­or two in order to be ful­ly con­tex­tu­al­ized, but it can also stand on its own, thanks to Stromberg’s intro­duc­to­ry com­men­tary for each essay. In this col­lec­tion, Singer retains much of his reli­gious and cul­tur­al zeal that has become famil­iar through­out his essays — he con­sid­ers the future Yid­dish to be of the utmost impor­tance to the sur­vival of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. As the intro­duc­tion states, this final vol­ume is Singer’s ​“fiery love let­ter to Yid­dish” in a world that was mov­ing away from its nor­mal­ized use. 

Singer’s appre­ci­a­tion for the intri­ca­cies of lan­guage — the words them­selves, apart from their cul­tur­al and com­mu­nal val­ue — is part of what makes him a writer, rather than a sociopo­lit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor, at his core. He sees the val­ue that a spe­cif­ic choice of words brings to a larg­er, cohe­sive thought or phrase — he feels an almost exis­ten­tial lev­el of con­cern for words. Are they being used cor­rect­ly, to the extent that they are most impact­ful? Are they prop­er­ly under­stood by both the read­er and the writer? These details are con­sid­ered through­out the book, a con­stant reminder that lan­guage must be inten­tion­al. Once he estab­lish­es his rev­er­ence for the words, Singer turns his focus to their sig­nif­i­cance in a larg­er con­text. ​“Lan­guage is a lot more than just a medi­um for basic com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” he writes. ​“Nations put their trea­sures and mem­o­ries inside it.” 

In his essays, Singer cov­ers a vari­ety of top­ics, such as right­eous­ness and sin, lit­er­ary trans­la­tions, intel­lec­tu­al­ism and provin­cial­ism, and more. Per­haps one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing take­aways is Singer’s belief that ​“Jews stud­ied their whole lives in lan­guages they did not prop­er­ly know,” and that they are hin­dered by speak­ing, learn­ing, and writ­ing in lan­guages that are not exclu­sive to their own cul­ture. His argu­ment sug­gests that Yid­dish — at least for East­ern Euro­pean Jews — was some­thing innate, as much a part of their Jew­ish iden­ti­ty as their reli­gious cus­toms or shared his­to­ry. He believed that move­ments towards inte­gra­tion with the rest of the world fol­low­ing the Haskalah (the Jew­ish Enlight­en­ment) — includ­ing speak­ing com­mon lan­guages and depri­or­i­tiz­ing reli­gious obser­vance — all con­tributed to the Jews’ inabil­i­ty to tru­ly thrive in their society. 

In his many argu­ments regard­ing the per­ils of assim­i­la­tion, Singer does not leave much room for nuanced per­spec­tives; to him, assim­i­la­tion is an ene­my of the Jew­ish peo­ple. As a Jew in the Unit­ed States who had watched the destruc­tion of his home­land and its peo­ple from afar, he chafed against the pres­sure to assim­i­late into Amer­i­can cul­ture, believ­ing instead that retain­ing his tra­di­tion­al Jew­ish­ness — espe­cial­ly his Yid­dish — was essen­tial. He writes that Yid­dish is a much rich­er lan­guage than Hebrew or Eng­lish, due to its many words and diminu­tives that add char­ac­ter to speech, and that it is as much (if not more than) a ​“holy lan­guage” as Hebrew. 

Yet, despite his crit­i­cal nature, Singer does see the com­plex­i­ties of human­i­ty, espe­cial­ly in the wake of the Holo­caust. The truth is, many of Singer’s essays — in con­ver­sa­tion with one anoth­er, at least — are rife with con­tra­dic­tions. Singer, like any oth­er writer, had views that were con­stant­ly shift­ing, whether he real­ized it or not. Read­ers of this vol­ume will watch as Singer los­es hope for the future of Yid­dish, while still hold­ing fast to his fer­vent love for what the lan­guage sym­bol­ized for the Jew­ish peo­ple as they moved into the lat­ter half of the twen­ti­eth century.