While Yiddish lives, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ghost stories may flourish
The play ‘Bashevis’ Demons’ puts three of the Nobel winner’s scary tales on their feet
Miriyem-Khaye Seigel and Shane Baker in Bashevis’ Demons. Photo by Magnus Swärd – Jewish Culture in Sweden
By PJ Grisar December 21, 2024
A tradition largely lost now, lingering in the works of Dickens and an odd line from “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” is the Yuletide ghost story.
In his Nobel lecture, Isaac Bashevis Singer, explaining his penchant for spooky tales — and how those who celebrate Christmas may be at a disadvantage — remarked “nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language.”
He of course meant Yiddish. But in the confluence of Christmas and Hanukkah, in the days of the Yiddish New York festival, Singers’ ghosts and his language live on to haunt us.
Bashevis’ Demons, an evening of three staged Singer stories, is playing at Theatre 154 in the West Village. Starring Shane Baker and Miriyem-Khaye Seigel, the show played Buenos Aires, Stockholm and Rio De Janeiro before arriving in Singer’s adopted home of New York (where he found employment here at the Forward).
The triptych of stories — “The Mirror,” “The Last Demon” and the monologue “Kukeriku” — draw from shtetl life and folk superstition.
A brief demonology on the back of the playbill explains the nature of the creature encountered by the young wife in “The Mirror” as she gazes at the left nipple of her nude reflection. (Singer adapted this story for a two-act play in the 1970s — here, Baker and Seigel perform the Yiddish text of the original story with supertitles.)
Set in the mid-1800s, “The Mirror” confronts old world fears of vanity, sex and the ayin ha’ra (evil eye) and is delightfully blasphemous. Baker is wonderful as a Jewish Mephistopheles clad in a kimono and brandishing a fan. Seigel, as the frivolous bride, traverses the demon realm on Baker’s back, in stock movement borrowed from Kyogen, the interstitial scenes of Japanese Noh plays.
Seigel, in a black bodysuit and cock’s comb, also embodies a rooster, defiant on the brink of its own slaughter. (Singer was a vegetarian, and once quipped “If I will ever get a monument, chickens will do it for me.”) In the final story, a sagely rabbi catches wise to a malevolent spirit when he asks to see his feet, which resemble a chicken’s.
The set is spare, with a faded area rug, a velveteen chair and a table. Under the direction of Moshe Yassur and Beate Hein Bennett, Singer’s words are the stars, most captivating in “The Last Demon,” an elegy for Jewish life in Europe and the terminal trajectory of its Yiddishe demons, who have no one left to tempt into sin.
As the titular fiend explains, there are Jewish demons and Gentile ones, and his kind can continue to exist only so long as a Yiddish word does.
He need not fear.
While gentiles await Santa, Jews in New York can hear an imp boast of clogging the chimney of the beit midrash. But then, Hanukkah or Christmas was never the busy season.
Puck-like, he proclaims his plans to disrupt the shofar and make the cantor hoarse: “There’s no lack of business for demons during the Days of Awe.”
The play Bashevis’ Demons is running now through Jan. 5 at Theatre 154. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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