Bashevis as “The Last Demon:” Dybbuks, Demons, and the Crisis of Modernity

• In Event: Dybbuks, Demons, and Hauntings: Images of Possession in Jewish Eastern Europe

Abstract

The Nobel-Prize winning Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, had a lifelong entanglement with demons and dybbuks, both in his fiction and beyond. Raised in a rabbinic Hassidic household, he left the observant world upon entering adulthood, yet throughout his life he struggled with existential doubt, and pursued a never-ending quest for “eternal truths, the essence of being.” The famed creator of the “demon monologues”– a series of short stories narrated by the YEYTSER-HORE, the evil inclination – Bashevis himself was referred to as an “impish” old man (Stromberg) in his later years. Moreover, as Singer’s longtime co-translator Dvorah Telushkin recalls, he would never go into an empty room without knocking first to “let the demons know that someone’s entering.”
In Bashevis’s fiction, the demonic narrator serves as a foil for rendering “the repressed or unconscious facets of human experience” (Frieden), while the dybbuks become a locus of trauma processing. Several dybbuk/demonic possessions featured in Bashevis’s highly-acclaimed debut novel, SATAN IN GORAY (1933) express the anxiety of transition ensuing from major societal shifts, and serve as a metaphor for the crisis of modernity, reinforced by past and present traumas. In Singer’s oeuvre, the demoniac turns into a mode of reflection on the modern Jewish condition, unsettling the conceptual paradigms of modernity.
This paper offers a closer look at a selection of short stories narrated by demons, such as “The Last Demon,” “The Dead Fiddler,” “Two Corpses Go Dancing,” and Bashevis’s novel SATAN IN GORAY. It will address the following questions: How is the demonic motif used to examine the modern crises of faith and identity? How and why does the demoniac become a useful framework for exploration of the complexity of the modern Jewish experience so deeply marked by past traumas? What are the implications of the most famous Yiddish writer rendering himself as “The Last Demon”? And, lastly how does resorting to premodern supernatural motifs of possession to cope with the challenges of modernity change our understanding of the modern human condition?

Author

• Agi Legutko, Columbia University