The Compassionate Vision of Isaac Bashevis Singer

    One of the most powerful pro-animal voices of the twentieth
century was the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91),
winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.1 Although Singer
survived the Holocaust by following his older brother Joshua to the
United States in 1935, his mother, younger brother, and many members
of his extended family who remained in Poland were killed. Although
Singer's later stories and novels set in America are mostly about
Holocaust survivors and refugees from Europe, he did not write about
the Holocaust directly. Nonetheless, it was the ever present lens
through which he viewed the world, especially when it came to the
exploitation and slaughter of animals, which upset him greatly.

The Eleventh Commandment

    Singer was born in the small Polish village of Leoncin where his
father was a Hasidic rabbi. Although he only lived there until the
age of three, Singer remembered that their house had very little
furniture, but many books. He also remembered the animals. "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."2

    After the family moved to Warsaw where his father served as a
rabbi in a poor Jewish neighborhood, Singer took to catching flies
and removing their wings. He would then place the wingless fly in a
match box with a drop of water and a grain of sugar for nourishment.
He did this until he finally realized he was committing "terrible
crimes against those creatures just because I was bigger than they,
stronger, and defter." This realization bothered him so much that
for a long time he thought about little else. After he prayed for
forgiveness and took "a holy oath never again to catch flies," his
thinking about the suffering of flies "expanded to include all
people, all animals, all lands, all times."3

    His experience catching flies appears in his autobiographical
novel, Shosha, which is set in Warsaw.4 When the narrator and Shosha
pass the street where they both grew up, Shosha tells him, "You
stood on the balcony and caught flies." The narrator tells her not
to remind him. When Shosha asks him why not, he tells her what
becomes a constant refrain throughout Singer's writings: "Because we
do to God's creatures what the Nazis did to us."5

    Another of Singer's early memories is of Yanash's market in
Warsaw where people brought chickens, ducks, and geese to be
slaughtered. "The butchers began to pluck their feathers even while
those creatures were still alive and wallowing in their own blood."6
The scenes of slaughter Singer witnessed there made a deep and
lasting impression on him. The Family Moskat, the first novel he
wrote after he came to America, has a slaughterhouse scene:
"Slaughterers stood near blood-filled granite vats, slitting the
necks of ducks, geese, and hens. Fowl cackled deafeningly. The wings
of a rooster, its throat just slit, fluttered violently."7

    The narrator of Shosha describes the slaughterhouse at Yanash's
market: "The same blood-splattered walls, the hens and roosters
going to their deaths shrieking with the same voices: 'What have I
done to deserve this? Murderers!' Since it is evening, the harsh
light of the lamps reflects off the slaughterers' blades. Women push
forward, each with her fowl to be killed. Porters load baskets with
dead birds and carry them off to the pluckers. This hell made
mockery of all blather about humanism." Deeply disturbed by what he
has seen, the narrator makes a decision: "I had long considered
becoming a vegetarian, and at the moment I swore never again to
touch a piece of meat or fish."8

    The main question that haunted young Singer was why there was so
much bloodshed in the world. He did not receive satisfactory answers
from his father, mother, or the morality books he read in Hebrew and
Yiddish translation. "I had studied in the book of Leviticus about
the sacrifices the priests used to burn on the altar: the sheep, the
rams, the goats, and the doves whose heads they wrung off and whose
blood they sprung as a sweet savor unto the Lord. And again and
again I asked myself why should God, the Creator of all men and all
creatures, enjoy these horrors?" He also wondered about the wars and
assassinations, pestilence and famine, bloodshed and exile described
in the Bible. "One misfortune followed another until the
Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Romans destroyed the Temple and
drove the Jews into Exile, where for almost two thousand years they
paid for the sins they themselves did not commit. How can a merciful
God allow all this to happen and keep silent?"9

    In The Certificate, another autobiographical novel set in
Warsaw, the young narrator stops in front of a sausage shop and
stares at the sausages hanging in the window.10 He addresses them
silently: "You were once alive, you suffered, but you're beyond your
sorrows now. There's no trace of your writhing or suffering
anywhere. Is there a memorial tablet somewhere in the cosmos on
which it is written that a cow named Kvyatule allowed herself to be
milked for eleven years? Then in the twelfth year, when her udder
had shrunk, she was led to a slaughterhouse, where a blessing was
recited over her and her throat was cut."11

    The narrator wonders if anyone is ever compensated for his
sorrows. "Is there a paradise for the slaughtered cattle and
chickens and pigs, for frogs that have been trodden underfoot, for
fish that have been hooked and pulled from the sea, for the Jews
whom Petlyura tortured, whom the Bosheviks shot, for the sixty
thousand soldiers who shed their blood at Verdun?"12

    The narrator of another Singer novel, Meshugah, sees on the
obituary page of a newspaper photographs of men and women who only
the day before had lived, struggled, and hoped.13 "Oh, what a
dreadful world!" he thinks. "How indifferent was the God who created
all this." At that very moment, Singer realized "thousands of people
languished in hospitals and prisons. In slaughterhouses the heads of
animals were being cut off, carcasses skinned, bellies ripped open.
In the name of science countless innocent creatures were being
subjected to cruel experiments, infected with harsh diseases." He
asks, "How much longer, God, will you look on this inferno of yours
and keep silent? What need have you of this ocean of blood and
flesh, whose stench spreads across your universe?....Have you
created this boundless slaughterhouse merely to show us your power
and your wisdom? Are we commanded to love you with our hearts, our
souls, for this?"14

    When young Singer set out to become a writer in Warsaw, he
purchased an account book in which he jotted down sketches, sayings,
and ideas for stories, novels, and plays. One of his entries was
about the Ten Commandments and how they might be improved. He wrote
that the Sixth Commandment--"Thou shalt not kill"--should apply to
all God's creatures, not just human beings.15 As if to emphasize
this point, Singer added 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."16

On to America

    When Singer went to the dining room of the ship that took him
from Cherbourg to New York in 1935, he requested a single table and
saw his chance to make a decision he had been thinking about for
some time. "Oddly, I had for years contemplated becoming a
vegetarian. I had actually gone through periods during which I had
eaten no animal flesh. But I often had to eat on credit at the
Writers' Club, and I lacked the courage to demand special dishes. I
had put it all aside for a time when I could act according to my
convictions." So act he did. When the waiter came over to take his
order, he told him, "I am very sorry, but I'm a vegetarian."

    The waiter informed him that the ship didn't have a special
vegetarian kitchen and suggested he join the kosher table. Singer
explained that being kosher wasn't the same as being vegetarian.
After overhearing his conversation with the waiter, the people at
the surrounding tables started asking Singer questions in French,
English, and German. Why was he a vegetarian? For health reasons?
Doctors' orders? Did it have to do with his religion? Some of the
men seemed annoyed that such a controversial subject had been
introduced at mealtime. "They had come here to enjoy themselves, not
to philosophize about the anguish of animals and fish. I tried in my
mangled German to explain to them that my vegetarianism was based on
no religion but simply on the feeling that one creature lacked the
right to rob another creature of its life and devour it."

    The other diners then proceeded to ignore him. "I don't know to
this day if it was my vegetarianism that put them into a hostile
mood or the fact that I chose to sit alone." The "vegetarian" meal
that the waiter brought him consisted mostly of leftovers--stale
bread, a chunk of cheese, an onion, and a carrot. When Singer
realized the other diners wanted nothing to do with him ("I had
committed the sin of isolating myself from others, and I had been
excommunicated"), he decided to forego the dining room and eat alone
in his cabin.17

    One night he ventured below deck to a concert in the ship's
salon. Standing at the door and watching the large crowd enjoying
themselves, he felt like an outsider. "There had been a time when I
envied those who took part in such recreations. I regretted the fact
that I couldn't dance. But this urge evaporated within me. There
reposed in me an ascetic who reminded me constantly of death and
that others suffered in hospitals, in prisons, or were tortured by
various political sadists. Only a few years ago millions of Russian
peasants had starved to death just because Stalin decided to
establish collectives. I could never forget the cruelties
perpetrated upon God's creatures in slaughterhouses, on hunts, and
in various scientific laboratories."18

    In America, when Singer visited an upstate Yiddishist colony
where socialist, anarchist, and Freudian followers discussed "ready-
made remedies for all the world's ills," he was surprised and
disappointed that "no one in the colony considered the evils
perpetrated daily upon God's creatures by the millions of hunters,
vivisectionists, and butchers."19 Later, in a cafeteria in New York
City as he read newspaper stories about assorted "human
idiosyncrasies and quirks," he thought, "A combination of a
slaughterhouse, a bordello, and an insane asylum--that's what the
world really was."20

A Horrid Form of Amusement

    Hunting was as repulsive to Singer as slaughtering animals and
eating them. Not long after his arrival in America, when he saw a
painting of mounted hunters with a pack of hounds, he thought, "What
a horrid form of amusement! First they go to church and sing hymns
to Jesus, then they chase after some starving fox."

    In The Estate, his novel set in late nineteenth century Poland,
Singer describes a Jewish dress ball at the Topolka estate
irreverently held on the eve of the Ninth of Ab, a date sacred to
Jewish memory because it commemorates the destruction of the
Jerusalem temple. The Jewish and Gentile guests arrive early so they
can hunt in a squire's forest nearby. Later, when they return to the
estate "with their booty: several rabbits, a pheasant, a few wild
ducks," they add them to the animals already butchered for the
feast, including the pig roasting on a spit, an especially jarring
desecration of the holy day. An old cow with a shrunken udder has
also been slaughtered for the occasion, and the poultry population
of Topolka has suffered "almost complete decimation." Preparations
for the feast produce a vivid scene: "The garbage trench behind the
kitchen was full of bloody heads, feet, wings, and innards of fowl
and attracted hordes of flies."21

    The Slave, another Singer novel set in Poland, links hunting to
greed, gluttony, and cruelty. When Jacob enters the castle of the
Pilitzkys, he is struck by the vast array of weapons and mounted
animals. "Everywhere were trophies of the hunt: stags' and boars'
heads staring down from the walls; stuffed pheasants, peacocks,
partridges, and grouse, looking as if they were alive." The castle
armory is full of swords, spears, helmets, and breastplates.
Everywhere Jacob turns he sees crosses, swords, nude statuary, and
paintings of battles, tournaments, and the chase. "The very air of
the castle smelled of violence, idolatry, and concupiscence."22

    At the end of Singer's posthumously published novel, Shadows on
the Hudson, the main character writes a letter from Israel in which
he associates hunting with the seeds of fascism. "As long as the
other nations continue going to church in the morning and hunting in
the afternoon, they will remain unbridled beasts and will go on
producing Hitlers and other monstrosities."23 Singer says he was
astonished to read about "highly sensitive poets, preachers of
morality, humanists, and do-gooders of all kinds who found pleasure
in hunting--chasing after some poor, weak hare or fox and teaching
dogs to do likewise." He was also dismayed by people who said they
wanted to go fishing when they retire, believing that fishing was a
harmless pursuit that will launch a new period of peace and
tranquility in their lives. "It never occurs to them for a moment
that innocent beings will suffer and die from this innocent little
sport."24

    While still relatively new to America, Singer went into a
cafeteria on 23rd Street in New York City where he read news stories
in a newspaper somebody had left on a table. He imagined things he
would do to change the world if he had the power. "I was taking
revenge for Dachau and Zbonshin. I gave back the Sudetenland to the
Czechs. I founded a Jewish state in Jerusalem. Since I was the ruler
of the world, I forbade forever the eating of meat and fish and made
hunting illegal."25

Satan and Slaughter

    Singer's horror at the killing of animals is clearly evident in
the slaughter scenes in his first novel, Satan in Goray. The scenes
revolve around the novel's two ritual slaughterers.26 Reb Zeydel
Ber, the uncle of the novel's main female character, and Reb
Gedaliya, who assumes the messianic leadership in Goray in the last
half of the novel.

    Reb Zeydel Ber does his slaughtering in a courtyard where there
is always a wooden bucket full of blood and where feathers
constantly fly about, as butcher boys in red-spattered jackets move
about with knives, shouting coarsely. Slaughtered chickens throw
themselves about on the blood-soaked earth, furiously flapping their
pent wings, as if trying to fly off. Doomed calves writhe on the
ground in their final moments, until their eyes glaze and life ebbs
from them.27

    When Reb Gadeliya becomes Goray's ritual slaughterer, the people
welcome his arrival since "beasts and fowls could be purchased
cheaply in the nearby villages, and all the people of Goray longed
for meat." After Reb Gedaliya requests that no expense be spared for
the approaching Passover, which he promises will be the final one
before redemption, Goray fills with "a great abundance of beasts and
fowls." From early morning until late at night, Reb Gadeliya stands
in front of a blood-filled pit and tirelessly cuts with his long
butcher's knife into warm, distended necks, "slaughtering
innumerable calves and sheep, hens, geese, and ducks." As he does
his slaughtering in the courtyard, he is surrounded by a tumultuous
throng of women and girls with their raised hands clutching pent
fowl. "Wings fluttered and beat, blood spurted, smearing faces and
dresses." Reb Gedaliya joked constantly, "for he hated sadness, and
his way of serving God was through joy."

    The people of Goray cannot remember a time when meat was so
plentiful, as early each evening butcher boys drive herds of calves,
sheep, and goats to the slaughterhouse where Reb Gedaliya rushes
about with his knife, "expertly slashing at the shaven necks, and
recoiling from the spatter of blood" and the butchers chop off the
heads of still breathing animals, "dexterously stripping hides,
tearing bodies open, and dragging out red satin lungs, half-empty
stomachs, and intestines." They blow through the windpipe of the
slain animal to inflate the lungs and slap the distended organs and
spit into the flaps to see if there are any vents that would make
the animal unclean. Reb Gedaliya stands in the middle with his
knife, urging the butchers to finish their examination, shouting
"Hurry! It's clean! It's clean!"

    In Singer's work this craving for flesh symbolizes corruption
and the close relationship between violence against animals and
volence against people. As the critic Clive Sinclair writes, "there
is a clear connection in Satan in Goray between the atrocities
perpetuated by Chmielnicki's warriors and the work of butchers,
represented by Reb Gedaliya and Reb Zeydel Ber."28

A Lust for Flesh

    Singer's short story "Blood," set in rural Poland, is about an
adulterous affair between Risha, who manages the large estate of Reb
Falik, her elderly husband, and Reuben, the ritual slaughterer she
hires after she convinces her husband they should raise cattle and
open a butcher shop in the nearby village of Laskev.29 Risha builds
a slaughtering shed on the estate for Reuben, buys him fine clothes,
and sets him up in an apartment in the main house so that he can eat
his meals at Reb Falik's table.

    Reuben does most of his slaughtering at night after Reb Falik
retires, so that he and Risha can be alone together in the shed.
"Sometimes she gave herself to him immediately after the
slaughtering." Whether they make love on a pile of straw in the shed
or on the grass just outside, "the thought of the dead and dying
creatures near them whetted their enjoyment." Soon when Risha joins
in the slaughtering, she takes such pleasure in it that she ends up
doing it all herself.

    The Laskev butchers, who have been forced out of business by
Risha's success, enlist a young man to spy on her, so one night he
goes to Reb Falik's estate and watches through a large crack in the
wall of the slaughtering shed. He sees Risha take off all her
clothes and stretch out on a pile of straw in the middle of animals
bleeding to death. By now the lovers have become so fat that their
bodies can barely join. "They puffed and panted. Their wheezing
mixed with the death-rattles of the animals made an unearthly
noise."

    When the young man returns to Laskev and reports what he has
seen, an angry crowd armed with bludgeons, knives, and ropes heads
for the estate. When Reuben runs away, Risha decides he is a coward
("He was only a hero against a weak chicken and a tethered ox.").
After Risha mobilizes the peasants on the estate to defend her
against the mob, which returns to Laskev, Risha goes to the study
house where Reb Falik is reciting the Mishna in his prayer shawl and
phylacteries. When he sees Risha with a knife, he drops dead.

    Risha converts to Catholicism, reopens her shops, and sells non-
kosher meats to the Gentiles of Laskev and the peasants in
surrounding villages who come to town on market days. At night she
mumbles to herself and sings songs in Yiddish and Polish with
meaningless phrases, "uttering sounds that resembled the cackling of
fowl, the grunting of pigs, the death-rattles of oxen." In her
dreams the animals get some small measure of revenge: bulls gore her
with their horns; pigs shove their snouts into her face and bite
her; roosters cut her flesh to ribbons with their spurs.

    Singer's powerful indictment of religiously sanctioned slaughter
ends several winters later when the people of Laskev are "terrified
by a carnivorous animal lurking about at night and attacking
people." When they finally catch and kill the mysterious beast, they
discover to their amazement that the animal is Risha. "She lay dead
in a skunk fur coat wet with blood....It was now clear that Risha
had become a werewolf."

Meat and Madness

    Another indictment of religiously sanctioned slaughter--"The
Slaughterer"--is about the mental anguish of Yoineh Meir, a young
rabbi who becomes the village slaughterer.30 When the elders of
Kolomir choose him, he protests ("He was soft-hearted; he could not
bear the sight of blood."), but the elders, his wife, his father-in-
law, and the new rabbi pressure him to accept the position.

    The work is pure torture for him. Killing each animal "caused
him as much pain as though he were cutting his own throat. Of all
the punishments that could have been visited on him, slaughtering
was the worst." Constantly immersed in blood and guts, Yoineh Meir
becomes depressed and inconsolable. His ears are beset "by the
squawking of hens, the crowing of roosters, the gobbling of geese,
the lowing of oxen, the mooing and bleating of calves and goats;
wings fluttered, claws tapped on the floor. The bodies refused to
know any justification or excuse--every body resisted in its own
fashion, tried to escape, and seemed to argue with the Creator to
its last breath."

    Yoineh Meir turns to the study of the Cabala to try to escape to
where there was "no death, no slaughtering, no pain, no stomachs and
intestines, no hearts or lungs or livers, no membranes, and no
impurities," but the smell of slaughtered animals never leaves his
nostrils. Even in bed at night, he's aware he is lying on feathers
and down plucked from fowl.

    Elul, a month of repentence which had once been a source of
spiritual renewal for him, now becomes a burden. In every courtyard
"cocks crowed and hens cackled, and all of them had to be put to
death." The holidays that follow--the Feast of Booths, the Day of
the Willow Twigs, the Feast of Azereth, the Day of Rejoicing in the
Law, the Sabbath of Genesis--bring no relief. "Each holiday brings
its own slaughter. Millions of fowl and cattle now alive were doomed
to be killed."

    Yoineh Meir has nightmares in which cows assume human shape,
with beards and sidelocks, and skullcaps over their horns. In one
dream the calf he slaughters turns into a girl. "Her neck throbbed,
and she pleaded to be saved. She ran into the study house and
spattered the courtyard with her blood." He even dreams he
slaughters his wife instead of a sheep. In another dream, a goat,
cursing in Hebrew and Aramaic, spits and foams at him, then jumps on
top of him and tries to butt him. He wakes up in a sweat and gets
out of bed to recite the midnight prayer, but his lips cannot utter
the holy words. "How could he mourn the destruction of the Temple
when a carnage was being readied here in Kolomir, and he, Yoineh
Meir, was the Titus, the Nebuchadnezzar!"

    Yoineh Meir becomes acutely conscious of the animals around him.
He hears the scratching of a mouse and the chirping of a cricket. It
seemed to him that "he could hear the worms burrowing through the
ceiling and the floor. Innumerable creatures surrounded man, each
with its own nature, its own claims on the Creator." A love wells up
inside him "for all that crawls and flies, breeds and swarms. Even
the mice--was it their fault that they were mice? What wrong does a
mouse do? All it wants is a crumb of bread or a piece of cheese." He
asks himself, how can one pray for life for the coming year, or for
a favorable writ in Heaven when one is robbing others of the breath
of life? He sees no way the Messiah can redeem the world as long as
this injustice continues to be done to animals. He thinks, "When you
slaughter a creature, you slaughter God."

    As Yoineh Meir stands at the pit all day, slaughtering hens,
roosters, geese, and ducks, and the pit fills with blood, he wonders
if he's losing his mind. "Feathers flew, the yard was full of
quacking, gabbling, the screaming of roosters. Now and then, a fowl
cried out like a human being."

    That night Yoineh Meir wakes from a nightmare bathed in sweat.
"I'll have none of your favors, God!" he shouts. "I am no longer
afraid of your Judgment! I have more compassion than God Almighty--
more, more! He is a cruel God, a Man of War, a God of Vengeance. I
will not serve Him. It is an abandoned world!" He goes to the pantry
and collects his knives and whetstone--his "instruments of death"--
and takes them to the outhouse, where he throws them into the pit,
knowing full well that he's blaspheming and desecrating the holy
instrument. He is mad, but he no longer wishes to be sane. He sheds
his prayer shawl and phylacteries. "The parchment was taken from the
hide of a cow. The cases of the phylacteries were made of calf's
leather. The Torah itself was made of animal skin."

    Yoineh Meir heads toward the river, shouting defiantly. "Father
in Heaven, Thou art a slaughterer! Thou art a slaughterer and the
Angel of Death! The whole world is a slaughterhouse!" With each
stride he feels more and more rebellious. "He had opened a door to
his brain, and madness flowed in, flooding everything." He throws
away his scullcap, rips off his prayer fringes, and tears off pieces
of his vest, feeling the recklessness of somebody who has cast away
all his burdens.

    The butchers, hearing Yoineh Meir has gone mad, chase after him.
As he runs toward the river, he imagines he's running into a bloody
swamp: "Blood ran from the sun, staining the tree trunks. From the
branches hung intestines, livers, kidneys. The forequarters of
beasts rose to their feet and sprayed him with gall and slime." He
knows he cannot escape. "Myriads of cows and fowls encircled him,
ready to take revenge for every cut, every wound, every slit gullet,
every plucked feather. With bleeding throats, they all chanted,
'Everyone may kill, and every killing is permitted.'" Yoineh Meir
breaks into a wail that echoes through the woods. He raises his fist
to God and shouts, "Fiend! Murderer! Devouring beast!"

    Two days later they find Yoineh Meir's body in the river
downstream near the dam. Since many witnesses testify that he acted
like a madman in his final moments, the rabbi rules that his death
was not a suicide, a ruling that allows Yoineh Meir to be buried
next to the graves of his father and grandfather. The story ends on
a bitterly ironic note: "Because it was the holiday season and there
was danger that Kolomir might remain without meat, the community
hastily dispatched two messengers to bring a new slaughterer."

Holy Creature

    "The Letter Writer," the story in which Singer describes what
animals suffer as an "eternal Treblinka," is about Herman Gombiner,
who lost his entire family to the Nazis.31 He is an editor,
proofreader, and translator at a Hebrew publishing house in New York
City, and he lives alone in a small uptown apartment crammed with
books, newspapers, and magazines. For companionship, Herman
corresponds with people who write letters to a periodical about
occult matters to which he subscribes.

    Each day Herman sets out a piece of bread, a small slice of
cheese, and a saucer of water for a mouse who comes out of her hole
at night, sometimes even when the light is on. "Her little bubble
eyes stared at him with curiosity. She stopped being afraid of him."
Herman gives her the Hebrew name of Huldah. Each morning before he
goes to work, Herman pours out the stale water from the night
before, refills the saucer, and puts out a cracker and small piece
of cheese. Before he leaves, he says, "Well, Huldah, be well!"

    After the publishing house closes and Herman loses his job, he
gladly spends his first day of unemployment at home with his books.
When twilight comes, he worries about Huldah until he hears a squeak
and sees her come out of her hole and look cautiously around. Herman
holds his breath. "Holy creature, have no fear," he thinks. "No harm
will come to you." She approaches the saucer of water, takes one
sip, then a second and a third. As she slowly starts gnawing on the
piece of cheese, Herman marvels at her--"a daughter of a mouse, a
granddaughter of mice, a product of millions, billions of mice who
once lived, suffered, reproduced, and are now gone forever....She is
just as much a part of God's creation as the planets, the stars, the
distant galaxies." When Huldah raises her head and stares at him
"with a human look of love and gratitude," Herman imagines she is
saying thank you.

    Herman grows weaker through the winter, but he manages to keep
sending and receiving letters with the help of a woman on his floor
who collects his mail and slips it under his door and who also mails
his letters for him. Sometimes he thinks about the ways the dead
continue to be present in the lives of the living and imagines that
his relatives must be still living somewhere. He prays for them to
appear to him. "The spirit cannot be burned, gassed, hanged, shot.
Six million souls must exist somewhere."

    As it becomes more difficult for Herman to get out of bed, he
worries about what will happen to Huldah. One night when he
remembers that she has gone without food and water, he tries to get
out of bed, but he can't move. He prays to God: "I don't need help
any more, but don't let that poor creature die of hunger!"

    Herman is close to death with pneumonia when a lady by the name
of Rose Beechman, with whom he has been corresponding, suddenly
shows up. She was planning to come to New York in two weeks anyway,
but her deceased grandmother contacted her from beyond the grave to
alert her that Herman was deathly ill and that she should go to him
immediately. She stays in his apartment and sleeps on a cot so she
can nurse Herman back to health.

    As Herman begins to recover, he remembers the mouse. "What had
become of Huldah? How awful that throughout his long illness he had
entirely forgotten her. No one had fed her or given her anything to
drink. 'She is surely dead,' he says to himself." In despair, he
prays for her: "Well, you've had your life. You've served your time
in this forsaken world, the worst of all worlds, this bottomless
abyss, where Satan, Asmodeus, Hitler, and Stalin prevail." Herman
consoles himself that Huldah is no longer hungry, thirsty, or sick,
but is at one with God. In a mental whisper he speaks a eulogy for
the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who,
because of him, had left this earth.

    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.

    Herman tells Rose Beechman about the mouse and asks her to pour
some milk in a dish just in case she is still alive. Later, when
Herman hears a noise, he sits up. "God in Heaven! Huldah is alive!
There she stands, drinking milk from the dish!" A joy he had hardly
ever known grips Herman and fills him with gratitude. He feels love
for Huldah and for the woman, Rose Beechman, who understood his
feelings and gave Huldah some milk. "I am not worthy, I am not
worthy," he mutters. "It is all pure Grace."

    Herman had not even cried when he received the news that his
family had perished in the destruction of Kalomin, "but now his face
became wet and hot. Providence--aware of every molecule, every mite,
every speck of dust--had seen to it that the mouse received its
nourishment during his long sleep." Herman watches Huldah lap the
milk slowly, pausing occasionally, sure in the knowledge nobody
would take away what was rightfully hers. Herman calls to her
silently in his thoughts, "Little mouse, hallowed creature, saint!"
and blows her a kiss. Huldah continues to drink, occasionally
cocking her head and glancing at Herman. When she finishes, she goes
back to her hole. The story ends with the first rays of a new day
making the windowpanes rosy and bathing Herman's books in a purplish
light. "It all had the quality of a revelation."

Vegetarian Protest

    Singer, who became a vegetarian permanently in 1962, often said
that not eating meat and fish was his protest against the way men
treated God's creatures. "For years I had wanted to become a
vegetarian. I didn't see how we could speak about mercy and ask for
mercy and talk about humanism and against bloodshed when we shed
blood ourselves--the blood of animals and innocent creatures."32 In
his novels and stories, most of the main characters either are
vegetarians, become vegetarians, or think about becoming
vegetarians, with the Holocaust parallel always in the foreground.

    Joseph Shapiro, the protagonist of The Penitent, is a secular
New York Jew who becomes a vegetarian as part of the transformation
that leads him to become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem.33 The novel
opens in 1969 at the Western Wall in Jerusalem where Joseph, with a
beard and earlocks and dressed in long gaberdine and a velvet hat in
the manner of the Orthodox, introduces himself to the narrator.
Joseph has renounced the modern world and the secular life of modern
Jewry and now lives in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox section of
Jerusalem. He has a wife and three children and attends a yeshiva
where he studies Torah. The day after Joseph meets the narrator at
the Western Wall, he goes to the narrator's hotel and tells him his
story.

    Joseph, a descendent of rabbis in Poland, survived the war by
fleeing the Nazis and wandering through Russia. After the war he
returned to Poland and married his former girlfriend, Celia. They
move to New York where Joseph prospers, but after he gets bored with
Celia, he takes a divorcee named Liza as his mistress. One night,
when he comes home early from Liza's, he finds his wife in bed with
another man. Joseph goes to a Hasidic prayer house on the Lower East
Side where he decides to turn his life completely around. Without
even bothering to go home for his clothes, he boards a plane for
Israel, where he is eventually taken in by a Hasidic family in Mea
Shearim. He obtains a divorce from Celia and marries the young, shy
daughter of his Hasidic host.

    Joseph's decision to stop eating meat is one of the central
themes of the novel. Early in the story when Joseph goes into a New
York restaurant to eat breakfast, he sees someone at the next table
eating ham and eggs. He thinks that "in order for this over-stuffed
individual to enjoy his ham, a living creature had to be raised,
dragged to its death, stabbed, tortured, scalded in hot water."
Joseph had already come to the conclusion that "man's treatment of
God's creatures makes mockery of all his ideals and of the whole
alleged humanism." He thinks about the man enjoying his ham without
the slightest concern 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."

    Joseph remembers the time he bought his mistress, Liza, a fur
coat made from the skins of dozens of animals and how "with what
rapture and enthusiasm she stroked the fur of those butchered
animals. How she poured out praises for skins torn from the bodies
of others!" Joseph tells the narrator, "Everything that had to do
with slaughtering, skinning, and hunting always evoked disgust
within me and guilt feelings that words cannot describe."

    Joseph also tells him about how both his wife and his mistress
loved to watch gangster movies and laughed when the gangsters shot
and stabbed each other. "I myself used to suffer terribly during
those scenes. Violence and bloodshed have always made me shudder."
He says they both also loved lobster. "I knew that a lobster is
cooked alive in boiling water. But these supposedly delicate ladies
didn't care that because of them a living creature was being
murdered in a most horrible fashion."

    Although Joseph had often thought about these things, he says
that morning in the restaurant they hit him on the head like a
hammer. He realized that in his business and personal life he had
been deceiving others and himself and that living such a false life
went against his deepest convictions. "I was myself a liar, but I
hated lies and deceit of every kind. I was a lecher, but I felt a
revulsion against loose women and against wantonness in general. I
ate meat, but a shudder ran through me each time I reminded myself
how meat becomes meat. That morning I realized for the first time
what a horrible hypocrite I was."

    That day Joseph makes his first major life-changing decision,
which "had no direct bearing on religion, but to me it represented a
religious decision." He vows to eat no more meat or fish, nothing
that had ever lived and been killed. "I am absolutely convinced that
so long as people shed the blood of God's creatures, there'll be no
peace on earth. It's one step from spilling animal blood to spilling
human blood."

    Joseph's vegetarian commitment makes him something of a misfit
among his new Orthodox brethren. They tell him the same thing his
father did: "You must not pity creatures more than the Almighty
does." Later, when his Hasidic host learns that Joseph doesn't eat
fish or meat, even on the Sabbath, he is shocked. But Joseph holds
his ground. "I was determined to live the way I wanted and the way I
understood. If this meant that I had to alienate myself from all
people, it would be no tragedy either. If one was strong, one could
endure this as well." Joseph tells the narrator, "For me, thou shalt
not kill includes animals, too." Since he was able to persuade his
new wife to agree with his way of thinking, "we are a family of
vegetarians."34

    In the "Author's Note" that follows The Pentitent, Singer writes
that the major difference between himself and Joseph Shapiro is that
he has not made peace with the cruelty of life and the violence of
man's history. "Joseph Shapiro may have done so, but I haven't. I'm
still as bewildered and shocked by the misery and brutality of life
as I was as a six-year-old child, when my mother read to me the
tales of war in the Book of Joshua, and the bloodcurdling stories of
the destruction of Jerusalem."35

Treblinka Was Everywhere

    Singer's observation that "every man is a Nazi" when it comes to
animals is also found in Enemies, A Love Story, his first novel set
in America.36 Its protagonist, Herman Broder, is another Singer
character who has lost his entire family in the Holocaust and sees
the reality of might makes right triumphant all around him. The
focus of the novel is Herman's struggle to cope with the
complications of having three wives: Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who
hid him from the Germans; Masha, his troubled mistress, also a
survivor, whom he later marries secretly; and Tamara, his first wife
who reappears in New York after it had been assumed she had been
killed by the Nazis.

    Herman lives with Yadwiga in Brooklyn, but he also rents a small
room in the same Bronx building where Masha lives with her mother.
The room has holes in the floor, and at night one can hear the mice
scratching. Masha sets traps, "but the sound of the trapped
creatures in agony was too much for Herman. He would get up in the
middle of the night and free them."

    When Masha takes Herman to the Bronx Zoo, he sees it as a
depressing prison. The eyes of the lion "expressed the despondency
of those who are allowed neither to live nor to die" and the wolf
"paced to and fro, circling his own madness." To Herman, the zoo is
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 the animals cry out their woes,
while others remain silent. "Parrots demanded their rights with
raucous screeching. A bird with a banana-shaped beak turned its head
from right to left as if looking for the culprit who had played this
trick on him."

    When Herman takes a trip to upstate New York with Masha, he
thinks he can hear the screeching of chickens and ducks. "Somewhere
on this lovely summer morning, fowl were being slaughtered;
Treblinka was everywhere." When flies, bees, and butterflies fly in
through the window of their bungalow, Herman refuses to take action.
"To Herman these were not parasites to be driven away; he saw in
each of these creatures the manifestations of the eternal will to
live, experience, comprehend."37

    Early one morning in Brooklyn, when Herman sees a sunlit bay
"filled with boats, many of them just returned from early-dawn trips
to the open sea," he thinks about the fish who had been swimming in
the water only a few hours before, but now lay on the boat decks
"with glassy eyes, wounded mouths, bloodstained scales. The
fishermen, well-to-do sportsmen, were weighing the fish and boasting
about their catches."38 It reminds him of the same Nazi mind-set
that killed his family. "As often as Herman had witnessed the
slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in
their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness
with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified
the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is
right."

    When Herman spends the day and night before Yom Kippur eve at
Masha's house, her mother buys two sacrificial hens for the ceremony
of Kapparot, one for herself and one for Masha. The custom, which
symbolically transfers one's sins to a fowl, requires the penitent
to swing a live hen (for a female) or a rooster (for a male) by the
legs in a circle above the head three times, while speaking the
following words: "This is my exchange, my substitute, my atonement;
this hen (or rooster) shall go to its death, but I shall go to a
good, long life, and to peace."39

    Masha's mother wants to buy a rooster for Herman, but he
refuses. "For some time now he had been thinking of becoming a
vegetarian. At every opportunity, he pointed out that what the Nazis
had done to the Jews, man was doing to the animals." As he looks at
the two captive hens, one white, one brown, lying on the floor,
"their feet bound, their golden eyes looking sideways," he objects
to the hypocrisy of killing hens for Yom Kippur. "How could fowl be
used to redeem the sins of a human being? Why should a compassionate
God accept such a sacrifice?" When Masha agrees with him and refuses
take the hens to the ritual slaughterer, her mother takes them
instead.40

    Late in the novel when Herman finds himself reluctantly
presiding at a Passover seder, he thinks again about the injustice
and hypocrisy of it all: "A fish from the Hudson River or some lake
had paid with its life so that Herman, Tamara, and Yadwiga should be
reminded of the miracles of the exodus from Egypt. A chicken had
donated its neck to the commemoration of the Passover sacrifice."

They Too Are God's Children

    Singer's aversion to the slaughter and eating of animals is also
present in Shadows on the Hudson.41 Early in the novel, set in New
York after World War II, Anna passes a fish store where fish with
"bloodstained scales and glassy eyes" are put out on ice. Nearby a
meat truck is parked outside a butcher shop where "big-bellied men
carted raw sides of beef atop their heads. In the window, among the
bloody chunks of meat, hung a whole lamb, its belly slashed open
from neck to tail." Anna thinks this could happen to anyone. "They
might easily have displayed me in the same way."

    Henrietta Clark and her companion, Professor Shrage, eat
"cheese, nuts, fruit, vegetables, and all sorts of cereals and
crackers" purchased from a health food store. Henrietta wonders,
"How could one hope for God's grace when one helped to kill the
living and deprived souls of their bodies?" Believing one should
stop eating cheese, milk, and eggs as well, she regards herself "as
no more than a semi-vegetarian, because indirectly she was assisting
the ritual slaughterers, the butchers."

    When the novel's central character, Hertz Dovid Grein, enters a
cafeteria and sees the cook bring out a roasting pan of meat from
the kitchen, he thinks, "What about the creatures whose flesh he's
carrying in here? A few days ago they were alive. They too have
souls. They too are God's children. They were quite possibly made of
better material than human beings. Since they were sinless, they
were certainly more innocent. But day after day they are ritually
sacrificed--angels in the shape of oxen, calves, sheep."

    Later Grein enters a synogogue and puts on a prayer shawl and
phylacteries the way his father used to do in Poland. He reads in
the liturgy the Bible passage about the consecration of the
firstborn of all creatures, which ends, "But every firstling of an
ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb, and thou wilt not redeem it, then
thou shalt break its neck." Like so many of Singer's characters,
Grein questions this religiously sanctioned cruelty: "In what way is
the ass guilty? Why does it deserve to have its neck broken? How
could God issue such commands?"

    When Grein recites the part of the liturgy that says, "The Lord
is good to all, and His mercy is over all He has created," he asks
himself if that's really true. "Was God really good at all? Had He
been good to the six million Jews in Europe? Was He good to all the
oxen and pigs and chickens that people were slaughtering at this
very moment? Could anyone really call such a God good?"

    Concluding that the essence of Judaism is that "people should
live in such a way that they did not build their happiness on the
misfortune of others," Grein decides to do what other Singer
characters do--return to God by making a vow to stop eating meat and
fish. "How could one serve God when one butchered God's creatures?
How could one expect mercy from heaven when one spilled blood every
day, dragged God's creatures to the slaughterhouse, caused them
terrible suffering, shortened their days and years? How could one
ask compassion of God when one plucked a fish from the river and
looked on while it suffocated, jerking on the hook?"

    Grein decides that even consuming milk and eggs is killing
cattle and birds because "one could get milk only by destroying the
calves for which the milk was intended, and the chicken farmers
sooner or later sold the fowl to the butcher." He thinks, "One could
easily exist on fruit, vegetables, bread, cereals, oil--the products
of the earth." He wonders how he can continue to wear leather shoes
and woolen clothes. "They sheared the sheep only until they
slaughtered them." And what about sleeping at night? "The mattress
contained horsehair, the pillows were stuffed with feathers.
Whatever one touched was made of some other creature's flesh, hide,
hair, bones."

    Grein questions God's ways: "Since God hated bloodshed, why had
He created a world founded on murder? Could one keep the commandment
'Thou shalt not kill' and still wage wars? Could one apply that
commandment only to people and not to animals?" Another character in
the novel remarks, "I knew that the earth with all its green
mountains and fertile valleys was nothing but a slaughterhouse. You
want to flee to God, but God Himself is the worst murderer."

    Toward the end of the novel, Anna is home alone in bed, when she
remembers "she had read in a Yiddish newspaper describing the great
number of Jews whom the Romanian Nazis had driven into a
slaughterhouse and butchered there."42 She thinks, "Yes, such
savagery had been perpetrated in this world, and whatever the future
might bring, the record of these events would remain in perpetuity.
No power could ever erase the appalling disgrace--not even God."

Affection for Animals

    Although Singer was shy and quiet during his first years in
America, his nephew Joseph remembers him as a playful man who often
entertained him by running through the house, barking like a dog or
quacking like a duck. "The whole family shares a tremendous love of
animals," says Joseph. "Isaac is maybe a little nervous about them,
but he really loves them."43 In The Family Moskat, Reb Dan is
waiting at an inn to continue his journey with his family when he
sees a goat in the courtyard. As the goat stares back at him, Reb
Dan suddenly feels "a rush of affection for the creature....He felt
like caressing the poor beast or giving it some tasty tidbit."44

    In Singer's story "The Yearning Heifer" a young Yiddish writer
from New York City, who rents a room for the summer on a farm
upstate, urges the farmer to return a cow who is bellowing
unhappily.45 The farmer explains she is from a stable where there
were thirty other cows and she misses them. "She most probably has a
mother or a sister there." The writer goes with the farmer when he
returns the cow to farmer from whom he bought her. Another story
"Brother Beetle" is about an encounter with a beetle ("'Brother
Beetle,' I muttered, 'what do they want of us?'").46

    The rooster narrator of "Cockadoodledoo" tells the story of the
rooster call.47 Although roosters end up getting slaughtered ("the
garbage dump is crammed with our heads and entrails"), the narrator
promises that the rooster call will never be silenced: "The rooster
may die but not the cockadoodledoo. We were crowing long before Adam
and, God willing, we'll go on crowing long after all slaughterers
and chicken-gluttons have been laid low. No butcher in the world can
destroy that."

    Singer was especially fond of birds. In The Certificate, when
the young narrator visits an apartment in Warsaw, he meets a parrot
perched on top of a large cage. "All at once the parrot, in what
sounded very like a man's voice, said, 'Parrot monkey.' For some
reason this moved me. Good Lord, I had no idea I had so much
affection for birds."48 "The Parrot" is about a man whose affection
for his pet parrot lands him in prison after he throws his woman
companion down a well for continually abusing his parrot and driving
him out into a winter storm.49 The narrator of Shosha dreams that,
as he is strolling with Shosha in a forest, he encounters birds who
are different from any he had ever known. "They were as big as
eagles, as colorful as parrots. They spoke Yiddish."50

    Singer's love affair with parakeets began in New York City in
the 1950s on the day a yellow parakeet suddenly flew into his
apartment. Dorothea Straus, the wife of Singer's publisher,
described what happened: "One summer morning, as he was sitting at
the kitchen table by the window open to the courtyard, he wished for
a companion. Immediately, as if in answer, a parakeet flew inside.
'As soon as I saw him, I knew we would be friends. God had sent him
to me. He was an old soul.'"51 Singer named him Matzoth and went to
a pet shop and bought him a female companion. He kept the door of
their cage open so they could fly freely around his apartment. As
Singer's biographer writes, "These birds loved each other and loved
Isaac, and he loved them. They would sit on his head or his knee and
coo. He would speak soft words to them in Yiddish or English."52

    In Enemies: A Love Story, Herman buys Yadwiga two parakeets, a
yellow male and blue female, whom she names Woytus and Marianna
after her father and sister. Herman is fascinated by the way the
pair communicates: "Woytus and Marianna seemed to have a language
inherited from generations of parakeets. They obviously carried on
conversations, and the way they would take flight together in the
same direction, within a fraction of a second, indicated that they
knew one another's thoughts."53 One day when Herman is in the
kitchen, he notices that "Woytus was delivering an avian lecture to
Marianna, who was perched near him on the stand. Her head was bowed
guiltily, as if she were being reprimanded for some inexcusable
misdeed." When Woytus whistles and trills, Herman thinks "he was
surely serenading Marianna, who rarely sang at all, but groomed
herself all day plucking at the down under her wings." When the
radio plays a song from a Yiddish operetta, the parakeets react "in
their own fashion. They screeched, whistled, tweeted, and flew
around the room."

    When Newsweek reporters went to Singer's apartment in 1978 to
interview him after it was announced he was to be awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature, Singer told them about his parakeets in the
next room.54 "Go in and you will see that they fly around. I have a
great love of animals, and I feel that in them and from them we can
learn a lot about the mysteries of the world because they are nearer
to them than we are."

    Singer's experience with parakeets came to a bad end the day the
maid left a window open accidently and Matzoth flew out. Singer was
disconsolate. He spent hours looking for Matzoth along Riverside
Drive and in Central Park. He put ads in the newspapers and followed
up on every answer, but he never got Matzoth back. Singer bought the
female parakeet another mate, whom he called Matzi II, but the new
parakeet accidently drowned in a vase of water. "They were a lot of
joy," he said, "but they were also much trouble. I suffered so much
when they suffered, when they got sick, got lost, or fell down, that
in a way I am happy I don't have them anymore."55

    After the parakeets, Singer spent more time feeding pigeons.
Dorothea Straus wrote that he became "a familiar sight on upper
Broadway, scattering grain, in the company of a congregation of
bedraggled city pigeons."56 He would feed them out of a brown paper
grocery bag that contained seed he purchased in local stores. "The
moment I come out with a bag of feed," Singer said, "they begin to
fly toward me from blocks away."57 Dorothea Straus described the
scene: "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."58

    Singer's longtime assistant, Dvorah Telushkin, writes that often
on their work breaks Singer would get his bag of feed and they would
go to Riverside Park. "Feeding the pigeons was an important ritual
in Isaac's work."59 She described one of the outings: "Isaac sat,
bent way over the edge of a bench as he scattered seeds on the
ground. The pigeons gathered near his feet, pecking vigorously as he
looked on in silence. He threw a couple of handfuls toward a little
sparrow and watched carefully as the tiny creature ate. 'This one to
the left,' he suddenly said, sitting up. 'I am interested in this
small one. The larger ones grab it all for themselves.'"60 Always
alert to those who were vulnerable, whatever the species, Singer had
a special interest in cripples, giants, and other people society
considered "freaks.". "I cannot help it," he told Telushkin. "To me
these are the real people. Frightened souls which no one sees."61

    In Enemies, A Love Story, as Herman is walking through the snow
drifts along Mermaid Avenue in Brooklyn, he sees a dead pigeon.
"Well, holy creature, you've already lived your life," he thinks,
and once again he questions God. "Why did you create her, if this
was to be her end? How long will you be silent, Almighty sadist?"62

The Shadow of Imminent Destruction

    Both parakeets and pigeons figure in "Pigeons," a story set in
Warsaw in the 1930s that foreshadows the Holocaust.63 The story
opens: "When his wife died, Professor Vladislav Eibeschutz had only
his books and birds left." Besides the books and manuscripts that he
keeps in closets and trunks and on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves
of his library, the professor has about a dozen bird cages for
parrots, parakeets, and canaries. Like Singer, the professor loves
his birds and leaves their cage doors open so they can fly around
freely. When Tekla, his half-blind Polish maid, complains about
having to clean up after them, the professor tells her, "Everything
that belongs to God's creatures is clean." In his apartment the
canaries sing, the parakeets twitter, talk, and kiss, and the
parrots chatter, "calling each other monkey, sonny boy, glutton, in
Tekla's village dialect."

    Every day when the professor goes outside to feed the pigeons,
flocks of them converge from all directions the moment he comes
through the front gate. He tells Tekla the feeding of pigeons means
as much to him as going to church or synagogue. God is not hungry
for praise, he tells her, but the pigeons wait each day from sunrise
to be fed. "There is no better way to serve the Creator than to be
kind to His creatures."

    Although caring for scores of birds who live in open cages and
are free to fly around the apartment involves more effort and
responsibility than feeding the street pigeons, "what joy these
creatures gave Professor Eibeschutz in return for the few grains
they ate!"

    One of the parakeets who has learned many words and even whole
sentences perches on the professor's bald spot, pecks at the lobe of
his ear, and climbs onto a stem of his spectacles. Sometimes he
stands like an acrobat on the professor's index finger as he writes.
He thinks "how complicated these beings were, how rich in character
and individuality. He could watch them for hours."

    One day, when the professor goes outside to feed the pigeons,
they swoop down from all sides and become a jostling mass in the
usual way. The pigeons perch on his shoulders and arms, fluttering
their wings and pecking at him with their beaks. One bold pigeon
even tries to land on the edge of the feed bag itself. Suddenly the
professor feels something hit his forehead. He is startled and
doesn't know what is happening until two more stones strike him on
his elbow and neck. He has read in the newspapers about attacks on
Jews by hoodlums in the Saxony Gardens and in the suburbs, but it
had never happened to him. The pigeons scatter, and the professor
retreats back inside where Tekla attends to the large bump on his
head.

    As the professor lies in bed, a Hebrew word he had long since
forgotten comes to his mind: reshayim, the wicked. "It is the wicked
who make history," he thinks, "their aim is always the same--to
perpetuate evil, cause pain, shed blood." That evening, after Tekla
cooks him some oatmeal, the professor falls asleep, but he wakes up
in the middle of the night, feeling an ache on the left side of his
chest and a sharp, violent pain shooting through his heart,
shoulder, arm, and ribs. He tries to stretch his hand out toward the
bell, but his fingers go limp before he can reach it. The last
thought that runs through his mind is: what will happen to the
pigeons?

    Early the next morning, when Tekla goes into his room and sees
how grotesque he looks, she screams so loudly that neighbors come
running. An ambulance arrives, but it is too late--Professor
Eibeschutz is dead. The news of his death fills his apartment with
flowers and well-wishers who want to pay their last respects. "The
frightened birds flew from wall to wall, from bookcase to bookcase,
tried to rest on lamps, cornices, draperies." Tekla tries
unsuccessfully to shoo them back into their cages. "Some disappeared
through the doors and windows left carelessly open. One of the
parrots screeched the same word over and over in a tone of alarm and
admonishment."

    The next morning pallbearers come and carry the coffin out of
the house. As the funeral cortege begins to move downhill toward the
Old City, flocks of pigeons fly in over the roofs. "Their numbers
increased so rapidly that they covered the sky between the buildings
on either side of the narrow street and darkened the day as if
during an eclipse. They paused, suspended in the air for a moment,
then, in a body, kept pace with the procession by circling around
it."

    The delegations walking behind the hearse are amazed at this
wondrous spectacle of pigeons darkening the sky as they circle above
the hearse. Not until they reach the intersection of Furmanska and
Marienstadt do the pigeons make one last circle and in a mass turn
back--"a winged host that had accompanied their benefactor to his
eternal rest."

    The next day, when Tekla goes out with a bag of feed, a few
pigeons fly down and peck at the food hesitantly as they glance
nervously around. During the night somebody painted a swastika on
the professor's door. The Nazi era is at hand. "The smell of char
and rot came up from the gutter, the acrid stench of imminent
destruction."

A Way of Life

    The importance of vegetarianism to Singer was evident in the
interview he gave in his Manhattan apartment on August 9, 1964.
After Singer and the two interviewers finished covering a wide range
of topics, including Singer's early years as a writer in America,
the art of translation, and world and Yiddish literature, one of the
interviewers said, "I guess that's about it." But Singer was not
finished. "Let me add that I am a sincere vegetarian. You may be
interested to know that even though I don't have any dogma, this has
become my dogma." He told the interviewers that as long as we are
cruel to animals and apply to them the principle that might makes
right, that same principle will be applied to us. "This is lately my
kind of religion, and I really hope that one day humanity will make
an end to this eating of meat and hunting of animals for
pleasure."64

    Singer told the Newsweek reporters who came to interview him
about his Nobel Prize for Literature that the suffering of animals
made him very sad. "I'm a vegetarian, you know. When I see how
little attention people pay to animals, and how easily they make
peace with man being allowed to do with animals whatever he wants
because he keeps a knife or a gun, it gives me a feeling of misery
and sometimes anger with the Almighty." He said it makes him want to
ask God, "Do you need your glory to be connected with so much
suffering of creatures without glory, just innocent creatures who
would like to pass a few years in peace?"65

    In another interview in the early 1980s when Richard Burgin
asked him about his vegetarianism, Singer told him, "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 who is
weaker than you and slaughter it, and torture it." He said he had
this feeling since childhood ("many children have it"), but his
parents discouraged him from acting on it by telling him he should
not try to be more compassionate than God. His mother warned him
that if he became a vegetarian, he would die of malnutrition. As he
got older, Singer felt he would be "a real hypocrite if I would
write or speak against bloodshed while I would be shedding blood
myself."

    He told Burgin, "It is just common sense to me that if you
believe in compassion and in justice you cannot treat the animals
the very opposite simply because they are weaker or because they
have less intelligence. It's not our business to judge these things.
They have the type of intelligence they need to exist."

    In the same interview Singer said, "I cannot call God merciful
and I feel a great protest in myself against creation. I also see
that man is merciless. The moment he gets a little power, other
people's misfortunes are nothing to him." He said protest defined
his relationship to God. If he ever tried to create a religion for
himself, it would be a "religion of protest." He told Burgin he once
wrote a book in Yiddish called Rebellion and Prayer or The True
Protestor, but it was never translated. "It was written at the time
of the Holocaust. It is a bitter little book and I doubt that I will
ever publish it. I may be contradictory in many ways, but I am a
true protestor. If I could, I would picket the Almighty with a sign:
'Unfair to Life.'" Singer ended the interview by telling Burgin,
"The man who eats meat or the hunter who agrees with the cruelties
of Nature, upholds with every bite of meat or fish that might is
right. Vegetarianism is my religion, my protest."66

    In the Foreword he wrote for Dudley Giehl's book on
vegetarianism, published in 1979,67 Singer asked what he considered
the eternal question: "What gives man the right to kill an animal,
often torture it, so that he can fill his belly with its flesh?"

    We know now, as we have always known instinctively,
    that animals can suffer as much as human beings. 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.

    The only justification for killing animals, Singer wrote, is
"the fact that man can keep a knife or an ax in his hands and is
shrewd enough and selfish enough to do slaughter for what he thinks
is his own good." He praised Dudley Giehl for arousing people's
consciences by telling them that by eating the flesh of animals and
by hunting, they are committing murder. "All their nice talk about
humanism, a better tomorrow, a beautiful future, has no meaning as
long as they kill to eat or kill for pleasure." Although Singer
wrote that he is aware that humanity's disregard for animals will
not end soon, "it is good that there are some people who express a
deep protest against the killing and torturing of the helpless."

    Singer concluded his Foreword with a warning: as long as human
beings go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any
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."

    When Singer died in 1991, the long obituary that appeared in the
New York Times failed to mention that he was a vegetarian. However,
the piece about him that appeared the following Sunday in the New
York Times Book Review did not omit that part of his life:

    He shied from chicken soup and became a devoted vegetarian.
    From childhood on he had seen that might makes right, that
    man is stronger than chicken--man eats chicken, not visa
    versa. That bothered him, for there was no evidence that
    people were more important than chickens. When he lectured
    on life and literature there were often dinners in his
    honor, and sympathetic hosts served vegetarian meals.
    "So, in a very small way, I do a favor for the chickens,"
    Singer said. "If I will ever get a monument, chickens
    will do it for me."68

    When Singer did have to attend a dinner where chicken was
served, he would decline the main course. When a woman once asked if
he avoided eating chicken "for health reasons," his answer was:
"Yes, for the health of the chicken."