Inventions by Isaac Bashevis Singer January 19, 2015

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 thirties, 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 N.K.V.D.

Illustration by Edward Kinsella / Photograph by Jens Mortensen

After the reports, the delegates congregate for a friendly glass of tea. Again, Comrade Krakower holds forth. Officially, he is one of the delegates, but in reality he is a representative of the Comintern. His goatee is reminiscent of Lenin’s; his voice has a hard metallic ring. He is thoroughly grounded in Marxism and knows several languages; he has delivered lectures at the Sorbonne. Twice a year, he travels to Moscow. And, as if all this were not sufficient, he is also the son of a rich man: his father owns oil wells near Drohobycz. He doesn’t have to be a paid Party functionary.

Published in the print edition of the January 26, 2015, issue.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning author of numerous novels, story collections, and children’s books, died in 1991.