On August 13, 1944, a feuilleton by Varshavsky, “Shayles, din-toyres, getn un khasenes, vos flegen forkumen in a beys-din shtub in poyln” (“Ritual Questions, Lawsuits before a Rabbi, Divorces and Marriages which Used to Take Place in a Rabbinical Court in Poland”) appeared in the second section of the Forverts’s Sunday edition. Its stories about the shrieking goose and the divorce of the old married couple later appeared in expanded versions in Varshavsky’s series about his father’s rabbinical court in the Forverts in 1955 and in the book In mayn tatns bezdn shtub (In My Father’s Court, 1956).

The feuilleton belonged to the series “Jewish Poland, Past and Present.” Unlike In My Father’s Court, which is narrated from the perspective of Bashevis as the child of a devout father and sceptical mother, the feuilleton only hints at its autobiographical origins. Similar to the book, it consists of ‘tsikave geshikhtes’ (spicy stories) about the transgressive behavior of common Jewish folks. In a highly entertaining manner, the feuilleton depicts the meshugas (craziness) of the lowest strata of Warsaw Jewry “which the psycho-analysts first started to explore years later.” The feuilleton is an early example of the literary trends of commemoration of ‘a world that is no more’ that dominated post-war Yiddish literature.

1943 was the annus mirabilis in Bashevis literary career and the year he became an American citizen. His first American Yiddish book, Sotn in goray un andere dertseylungen (Satan in Goray and Other Stories) appeared under the imprint Matones Farlag in New York. It included his 1935 debut novel and newly written monologues in the series “Gedenkbukh fun der yeytser-hore” (“The Memorial Book of the Evil Inclination”).

In February 1944, his older brother, the Yiddish writer I. J. Singer (1893-1944), suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of fifty. Later that year, Bashevis received the devastating news that his mother and younger brother Moyshe who fled Warsaw after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 had perished in a Soviet labor camp. Since 1923, I. J. Singer had worked for the Forverts, where he published feuilletons under his own and his wife’s name, Genia Kuper, and serialized acclaimed novels such as Yoshe Kalb (1932) and The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936). It was thanks to I. J. Singer, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1934, that Bashevis received the needed travel documents to travel to the U.S. and employment as a freelancer at the Forverts.

Whether writing as Varshavsky or under other pseudonyms, Bashevis was a remarkably prolific feuilleton writer. In 1944, Bashevis introduced another pseudonym, D. Segal, who wrote lighter pieces about human interest stories and Jewish Poland, such as “Many people like to gossip about their best friends” (July 19, 1944) and “Simkhes toyre in Eastern Europe” (Oct.10, 1944). As a result, Bashevis’ output as a feuilleton writer in Forverts increased more than twofold, from an average of 50 pieces each year between 1939-1943 to 107 in 1944 and 127 in 1945. As the ongoing destruction of Jewish Poland was regularly featured in the Forverts’ news and op-ed pages, Bashevis doubled his output in the Forverts to a level that would continue in the post-war period.

The feuilleton enabled Bashevis to address a variety of topics some of which he would recycle in his serialized novels and life-writing in the newspaper. It is my contention that Bashevis responded to the personal and collective catastrophe of 1944 by taking on the mantle of his older brother as journalist and novelist at the Forverts. This is also indicated by the more than twofold increase of his feuilletons in 1944. It made him an invaluable staff writer who worked overtime at the newspaper. The Forverts editor Hillel Rogoff praised him: “We, on the editorial board, cannot stop marveling about Bashevis’ prolific output. He produces more than two other writers who work full time at the newspaper” (Der gayst fun forverts, 1953, p.229) In November 1945, Bashevis began the weekly serialization of his family chronicle The Family Moshkat in the Forverts. Bashevis dedicated the novel to I. J. Singer, “his spiritual father and master,” when it was published in Yiddish and English translation in 1950.