At the end of the 1983 English translation of his novel The Penitent, Isaac Bashevis Singer appended an author’s note not found in the earlier Yiddish original. The book tells the story of Joseph Shapiro, a Holocaust survivor who eventually becomes disillusioned with his life of unbelief and dissolution, returns to Orthodoxy, and takes up residence in the ḥaredi enclave of Meah Shearim. Examining the book itself in light of this note—unusually detailed in comparison with others in Singer’s oeuvre—and in light of Singer’s other works, David Stromberg teases out a picture of the author’s own theology:
Rather than merely reminding his readers that the narrator and author are not the same, Singer goes on [in his note] to describe specific differences between positions held by himself and by Shapiro. . . One difference [is that] Shapiro makes mankind his target and believes that faithlessness is what leads to immorality and even evildoing. Singer makes his target “all possible variations of suffering” and “the calamity of existence.” Moreover, . . . someone like Singer is implicitly not included in Shapiro’s attack [on the faithless] because anyone who is protesting or against God has clearly not forsaken the divine but enters into a kind of ongoing dialogue with it. Singer assures his “imagined reader” that while Shapiro may have “made peace with the cruelty of life,” the author himself has not. . . .
Singer already said much on this topic in his introduction to A Little Boy in Search of God (1976). . . . “To me,” he writes, “a belief in God and a protest against the laws of life are not contradictory. There is a great element of protest in all religion.” . . .
In Singer’s thought, . . . God and His providence are reinstated [through artistic] creativity without unquestionably requiring recourse to organized religion. This understanding is nevertheless reached through an engagement with religion, even if religion ultimately teaches those things which are beyond its own boundaries. This conclusion is developed, in ever more precise terms, in The Death of Methuselah (1988), which features Singer’s final author’s note. Here, the author who has rebelled and protested against nature and God through his literary works takes a more inclusive final position. “Art must not be all rebellion and spite,” Singer writes; “it can also have the potential of building and correction.” . . .
In his final stated position, Singer represents as a collective human goal the improvement of the world into which we are born: “[Art] can also in its own small way attempt to mend the mistakes of the eternal builder in whose image man was created.” Creativity and creation—which religion has the potential to facilitate—become for Singer the source, the consequence, and the treatment of human suffering.
Read more on In Geveb: http://ingeveb.org/articles/rebellion-and-creativity-isaac-bashevis-singer