THE LECTURE

Short Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1967

In midwinter the narrator, N., is traveling from New York City to Montreal to deliver a lecture that he describes as an "optimistic report on the future of the Yiddish language." The journey begins auspiciously, but near the Canadian border the train becomes snowbound, and in his imagination N. is transported to the Poland of his youth. Because of this delay N. arrives at his destination in the middle of the night, to be greeted only by two Holocaust survivors, an old woman and her daughter, Binele. The old woman's appearance and accent again recall Poland, as do the street and the very apartment to which they take N. "No stage director," he remarks, "could have done a better job of reproducing such a scene of old-country misery." The mother cannot stop talking about her experiences in Auschwitz and the loss of her family members under the Nazis.

While the apartment and its inhabitants recall pre-World War II Poland, N.'s room reproduces life in a concentration camp. The cot is as narrow and rickety as a plank, the air freezing. He hears scratching so loud it seems to come from some monster trying to raze the building. N. lies in agony thinking, "Well, let me imagine that I had remained under Hitler in wartime. Let me get some taste of that, too." He imagines himself in Treblinka or Maidanek. "Tomorrow there would be a 'selection,' and since I was no longer well, I would be sent to the ovens … I won't come out of here alive." He does live to tell the tale, but during the night the mother dies, and the optimistic lecture mysteriously vanishes.

This series of disasters reveals the lingering effects of a dark past. Binele objects to her mother's morbid stories and tries to live in the present, but her wrist bears the tattooed reminder of her inability to escape history. Though the narrator lives safely in America, he, too, thinks that the present has been rendered "totally remote and insubstantial" amidst these mementos of a former existence. N. calls the disappearance of his manuscript Freudian in the sense that even before leaving New York he had felt it presented too glowing a vision. After the harrowing night in Montreal he could not give this lecture; the mother's death reflects the disappearance of N.'s (that is, Singer's) Yiddish-speaking audience.

Set in a midwinter night, "The Lecture" is a dark story, but it contains elements of humor and hope. The scene of the mother's death becomes farcical when N. and Binele repeatedly collide with each other as they chase about the apartment trying to get help. The story, which first appeared in the January 1968 Playboy, even offers a bit of the erotic. Binele runs about only half-dressed, and N. inadvertently touches her breast. The story ends with the coming of day. Singer writes in the penultimate paragraph, "Life had returned. The long nightmare was over." N. embraces Binele and promises to care for her. The old world and old life still exert their dire influence, but a new life is possible for those who have survived. In the curious way that life imitates art, Singer in 1978 would deliver that lost optimistic lecture not in Montreal but in Stockholm in accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature.

—Joseph Rosenblum