The Penitent by Isaac Bashevis Singer

A strange choice for me, but here’s why. I’m a vegetarian (that’s no meat and no fish, thank you). I’ve been a vegetarian for 30 years. I don’t have rickets or anaemia or any debilitating diseases. And I am daily amazed at what a blind spot otherwise progressive people have, lesbians and feminists included, about consuming the flesh of dead animals. To me the choice to be vegetarian makes sense in so many compelling ways – producing animals for food damages the environment, wastes resources, fills human bodies with hormones, cholesterol, puss and other undesirable substances, stands as a signifier for patriarchal power, and is downright inhumane to other sentient beings. There that’s my diatribe.

So maybe that’s why I could tolerate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s rant that runs unfettered through this book. I’ve been purposefully seeking out novels where there is a theme of vegetarianism. And there aren’t many of them. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 – 1991) was a vegetarian, and many of his books have vegetarian characters.

An orthodox Jewish man, Joseph Shapiro (“The Penitent”) meets the author at the Wailing Wall, and tells his story. Having fled Poland at the Nazi invasion, he ends up in New York, where everything revolves around business and sex. The emptiness of this life drives him to Israel, and traditional Judaism. And vegetarianism; “I had long since come to the conclusion that man’s treatment of God’s creatures makes mockery of all his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. …I’ve thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.”

Despite being published in 1984, there’s a very contemporary feel to Shapiro’s railing against the evils of modern society. He describes lawyers as people whose function is to teach murderers how to avoid punishment so that they can kill more innocent people. And he is particularly scathing when he sees the Jewish community adopting this modern emptiness; “We already publish Hebrew magazines that describe in detail which Hollywood harlot slept with what Hollywood pimp."

Which forces me to admit that while Shapiro may be a good vegetarian, he is also a shocking misogynist, regularly describing women in terms of their projected propensity to draw him into sexual depravity, and referring to them as wenches and whores. And he’s a dreadful homophobe, even if he expresses it in an interesting way: “When a man sleeps with a modern woman, he actually gets into bed with all her lovers. That's why there are so many homosexuals today, because modern man is sleeping spiritually with countless other men. He constantly wants to excel in sex because he knows that his partner is comparing him to the others.”

This book is open to many readings, which is what makes it interesting. Is Shapiro’s exploration of faith and religious practice designed to persuade us to turn our back on materialism and reach out for spiritual fulfilment, or does it expose the intolerance of fundamentalism? Does Isaac Bashevis Singer, the author, agree with the moralistic outbursts of his main character? And does this book “work”, when it is so light on plot or narrative, and so grindingly heavy on polemic?

Harold Bloom published an interesting view of The Penitent in the New Yorker