Tale of Sex and Scum in Poland

Eryn R. Brown

Anyone who picks up Isaac Bashevis Singer's latest novel, Scum, may be tempted to view the book as a glorified yet deliciously decadent study break. Like any ideal beach reading, Scum is short (217 pages) and sprinkled with a generous share of immorality, violence and weird sex.

But be forewarned: Scum is no trashy mini-series plot waiting for the right network scriptwriter and a corporate sponsor. Like the characters it explores, the book's outward simplicity is deceptive. Singer's genius--his depiction of moral decay--is immensely complex and not fully apparent until the book's last explosive pages.

Scum begins in Warsaw. Max Barabander is a godless, physically impressive, womanizing ex-convict whose mid-life crisis leads him to abandon respectability in Argentina for the impoverished streets of his youth. At 47, his life has been completely disrupted. Max's only son has died, and he and his wife Rochelle find themselves haunted by a newly-discovered consciousness of their own frailty.

Max "somehow [forces] himself to put this calamity out of his mind," but Rochelle, who has become so death-obsessed that she has "had a monument maker engrave her own tombstone," refuses to sleep with him. Max obediently follows her instructions to find someone new, but he faces a new challenge: impotence. For a man who had boasted that he "could do with women [what] no one, except the women involved, would believe," this handicap overshadows even the tragic death of his son.

Accordingly, impotence is what Scum is all about. As Singer writes, "Max knew that he had really come to Poland looking for a girlfriend." Even though there are a variety of other "matters to settle," including visiting his parents' graves in the country to repent for having abandoned them without a word, the only thing that Max seems to pay any attention to in Poland is sex.

Max begins his quest immediately after arriving in Warsaw. He ogles a group of young women sitting alone at a cafe. He makes eyes at a middle-aged married grandmother. He also begins to seduce the beautiful and impressionable Tsirele, daughter of the neighborhood's virtuous rabbi, telling her that his wife is dead and giving her money with the secret hope that he'll "be able to come to an understanding with her."

With so many effortlessly available (or tantalizingly unavailable) women around, it is not surprising that our Casanova overcomes his physical impotence. The reader is also not puzzled when Max permanently abandons any hope of retrieving his moral potency. By the chaotic end of the novel, he has become incoherent and amoral, a prisoner of his own cravings.

This moral impotence is what most interest Singer, and his descriptions of Warsaw and its alienated citizens provide a poignant illustration of the decay that accompanied the city's forced modernization under Russian occupation.

All of Max's old neighbors suffer at the hands of the new society. Tsirele's father is impoverished and powerless under new legal codes, and her brother, educated in a state-run Jewish school, loafs about on the balcony, out of school for a secular holiday. Even Max's friends, the old Warsaw lowlifes, feel that they have lost control of the city's crime networks.

As "Blind Mayer" explains, "It's not the old Warsaw anymore. Gone, buried. Once everyone had his own territory. Now the worst lowlife comes here. Nobody knows anybody else...In my day, Commissar Voynov drank brandy with us. The sergeant used to bow to me and show me respect, may I live to be buried in a Jewish cemetary."

Max lives up to the book's title--indeed, his amorality and ultimate powerlessness make his character supremely unsympathetic. However, Singer enables the reader to appreciate Max's society even as we grow to dislike him. The presentation of decaying Jewish Warsaw is thoroughly moving, perhaps more so because the culture was completely destroyed during World War II.

The quaint world of Scum--complete with its filthy streets and tortured inhabitants--is gone. But Singer, by capturing the mood of 1906 working-class Warsaw life and adding a dimension to the narrative, elevates this book from a mere sex-riddled tale to a significant social commentary.