Animal Rights: A History Issac Bashevis Singer

Also in Enemies, A Love Story :

In The Penitent, the protagonist says "when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi."

Many animal rights advocates have continued to make the comparison.

In 2001 Charles Patterson's book the The Eternal Treblinka our treatment of Animals and the Holocaust was published.

Review:

This book explores the similar attitudes and methods behind modern society's treatment of animals and the way humans have often treated each other, most notably during the Holocaust. The book's epigraph and title are from "The Letter Writer," a story by the Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

The Foreword is by Lucy Rosen Kaplan, former attorney for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her foreword, the Preface and Afterword, excerpts from the book, chapter synopses, and an international list of supporters can be found on the book's website at:

Selections from Chapter 7 the Boundless Slaughter House from The Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson that reflect Isaac Bashevis Singers' developing attitude toward animals. .

Singer was born in the small Polish village of Leoncin where his father was a Hasidic rabbi. Although he only lived there until the age of three, Singer remembered that their house had very little furniture, but many books. He also remembered the animals. "Every week there was a market, and many peasants would come to the town bringing livestock. Once I saw a peasant beating a pig. Maybe it had been squealing. I ran in to my mother to tell her the pig was crying and the man was beating it with a stick. I remember this very vividly. Even then I was thinking like a vegetarian."

After the family moved to Warsaw where his father served as a rabbi in a poor Jewish neighborhood, Singer took to catching flies and removing their wings. He would then place the wingless fly in a match box with a drop of water and a grain of sugar for nourishment. He did this until he finally realized he was committing "terrible
crimes against those creatures just because I was bigger than they, stronger, and defter." This realization bothered him so much that for a long time he thought about little else. After he prayed for forgiveness and took "a holy oath never again to catch flies," his thinking about the suffering of flies "expanded to include all people, all animals, all lands, all times."

His experience catching flies appears in his autobiographical novel, Shosha, which is set in Warsaw. When the narrator and Shosha pass the street where they both grew up, Shosha tells him, "You stood on the balcony and caught flies." The narrator tells her not to remind him. When Shosha asks him why not, he tells her what becomes a constant refrain throughout Singer's writings: "Because we do to God's creatures what the Nazis did to us."

In The Certificate, another autobiographical novel set in Warsaw, the young narrator stops in front of a sausage shop and stares at the sausages hanging in the window. He addresses them silently: "You were once alive, you suffered, but you're beyond your
sorrows now. There's no trace of your writhing or suffering anywhere. Is there a memorial tablet somewhere in the cosmos on which it is written that a cow named Kvyatule allowed herself to be milked for eleven years? Then in the twelfth year, when her udder had shrunk, she was led to a slaughterhouse, where a blessing was
recited over her and her throat was cut.

At the end of Singer's posthumously published novel, Shadows on the Hudson, the main character writes a letter from Israel in which he associates hunting with the seeds of fascism. "As long as the other nations continue going to church in the morning and hunting in the afternoon, they will remain unbridled beasts and will go on producing Hitlers and other monstrosities." Singer says he was astonished to read about "highly sensitive poets, preachers of morality, humanists, and do-gooders of all kinds who found pleasure in hunting--chasing after some poor, weak hare or fox and teaching
dogs to do likewise." He was also dismayed by people who said they wanted to go fishing when they retire, believing that fishing was a harmless pursuit that will launch a new period of peace and tranquility in their lives. "It never occurs to them for a moment that innocent beings will suffer and die from this innocent little
sport.

Excepts from Chapter Seven This Boundless Slaughterhouse The Compassionate Vision of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson.
Authors website: powerfulbook.com/

Also of interest, an Interview with Author of Eternal Treblinka by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D

Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story