SOURCE: Sherman, Joseph. “What's Jews?: Isaac Bashevis Singer's Androgenus.” Prooftexts 14, no. 2 (May 1994): 167-88.

In the following essay, Sherman explores the quest for spiritual self-fulfillment in Singer's story “Androygenus.”

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Na dir a groshn far dem oylem-habe, says a militant Maskil to his disciples near the beginning of one of Singer's monologue stories not yet published in English—bay mir yidishkayt iz oylem-haze. And with this emphatic assertion of what appears to be gross materialism, Singer launches into a remarkable critique of a once-vibrant movement toward spiritual renewal, which has fallen into decay. Through an investigation of the painful quest to find spiritual self-fulfillment of a devout but sexually ambivalent Jew, Singer's story “Androygenus”¹ probes the possibility of accommodating the rigid injunctions of conventionally apprehended halakhah to the amorphous exigencies of unconventional lived experience.

While Singer is a writer of fiction however interrogative, and not a polemicist for causes however...