"Isaac Bashevis Singer" [a prose poem by Jim Dolot]

Isaac Bashevis Singer keeps touching the same hot stove of mysticism and raising his palm to show it blackened and painless as a printed page.  It is all the more frightening because we are the ones in agony, the fool's errand Jews, Kabbalists without Hebrew.  He gets his own blessing, instead, and oddly, from Nietzsche, whose name looks and sounds like witchcraft, but was a hymn to the singed music of enlightenment.  I cannot exorcise you, Isaac!  I can only interpret your name on the seam between laughters, Yiddish, Hebrew, English; the last of which may not be your actual motive.  You appear before me as a vast Sewing-Machine, stitching every sentence as a hem, a fold, thick and definitive, that belongs to no garment.

-- Jim Dolot