In 1965, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote and published a story, in Yiddish, about the guilty conscience of a Polish-Jewish Communist. The story was translated into English not long after it was written, but the translation has only now appeared in print. (For more on Singer’s translators, see our new essay by Ruth Wisse.)
Since moving to the country, I find myself growing sleepy by ten o’clock at night. I retire at the same time as my parakeets and the chickens in the coop. In bed, I peruse “Phantasms of the Living,” but I must soon turn off the light. A dreamless sleep—or one with dreams I can’t recall—takes hold of me until two in the morning. At two, I wake up completely rested, my head buzzing with plans and possibilities. On the winter night I will describe, it came to me to write about a Communist—in fact, a Communist theoretician—who attends a leftist conference on world peace and sees a ghost. I saw it all clearly: the meeting hall, the portraits of Marx and Engels, the table covered with a green cloth, the Communist, Morris Krakower, a short, stocky man with a head of close-cropped hair and a pair of steely eyes behind thick-lensed pince-nez. The conference takes place in Warsaw in the 30s, the era of Stalinist terror and the Moscow Trials. Morris Krakower disguises his defense of Stalin in the jargon of Marxist theory, but everyone grasps his meaning. In his speech, he proclaims that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can insure peace, and, therefore, no deviation either to the right or to the left can be tolerated. World peace is in the hands of the NKVD.
Read more on New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/inventions-2