DEMONI E DYBBUKIM: IL SOPRANNATURALE NEI RACCONTI ‘AMERICANI’ DI ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Abstract

This article focuses on the theme of the afterlife in I.B. Singer’s short stories by referring to demons. The demonic marks elements taken from Jewish folklore, but it is also a sign of a reflection on the afterlife that together with the historical and memorial possibility of the survival of Jewish culture after the Shoah intercepts the religious, sacred and superstitious dimension of life after death. In fact, in the short story The Last Demon, the dybbuk becomes an explicit metaphor for literary writing seen as the only possibility of survival for the world wiped out by Nazism, an issue, that of survival through storytelling, which more generally concerns the very choice of writing in Yiddish (and of taking part in the American translations of his own works, even self-translating them) and which bases the narrative on the urgency of constructing a transgenerational memory even implied in the biblical prescription to remember (zakhor).
The destroyed world of the Polish shtetlach is an afterlife, a world far away in time and space, when Singer writes about it. In his short stories the figures of the dybbukim - i.e. supernatural beings, demons or wandering spirits of the dead in search of a body to re-enter - can be seen as a useful trace of the interference between the real world and the supernatural dimension. Such an interference is referred to by certain existential themes such as loneliness, death or love, which are dealt with in numerous stories that show traces and forms of the supernatural in modern life, as it is typically marked by the tension between the sacred and the secular. There are also ironic declinations of the theme, which can be framed in the context of the tension between Jewish mysticism and rationalism, as in the fine example of Taibele and her Demon.
After developing the analysis through a selection of I.B. Singer’s short stories, the article considers some of their adaptations for film and theatre: Love Comes lately (Bis später Max!), a 2007 comedy by Jan Schütte based on the short stories Alone, The Briefcase and Old Love; Taibele and her Demon by Moni Ovadia and Pamela Villoresi (1995, from the short story of the same name by I.B. Singer); and A Shed, the Demon of Tishevitz (from the short story The Last Demon, which in Yiddish is titled Mayse Tishevitz) by Olek Mincer from 2011.