In any event, Billy Bob Thornton fits almost seamlessly into the old Matthau role after his hilariously anti-Christmas-spirit exuberance in Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003). Mr. Ficarra and Mr. Requa, the screenwriters for Bad Santa, are on hand again to collaborate with Mr. Linklater on the new edition of Bad News Bears.

The results are at best mixed. So why am I leading off this week’s column with a movie, the subject and genre of which I have found singularly unappetizing for all of my adult life? The answer involves a resurgence of my auteurist inclinations. Since I decided recently that I was going to live forever, I figured that I had enough time to update The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929-1968 to the 21st Century, beginning with Richard Linklater, whom I am tentatively placing in the category “The Far Side of Paradise.”

Still in his 40’s, Mr. Linklater may have a stab at making my pantheon of English-language auteurs, which takes in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the British Isles. Among the other recent auteurs I am following (though sometimes from a great distance) are: Robert Altman, Harold Becker, Robert Benton, the Coen Brothers, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Clint Eastwood, the Farrelly Brothers, Peter Jackson, Jim Jarmusch, Ken Loach, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Errol Morris, Mike Nichols, David O. Russell, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant and Terry Zwigoff … but I am still very early in my research.

Part of my motivation in studying the present for clues to the future is to escape the spiritual paralysis of an unforgiving nostalgia for the past. André Bazin (1918-1958) once tried to exclude Hollywood directors from the purview of François Truffaut’s La Politique des Auteurs by invoking “the genius of the system” as an alternative theory to explain the large number of Hollywood classics. I raised my very tentative and respectful objections to Bazin—a film theorist I admired above all others—in my 1963 essay in Film Culture Magazine, entitled “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” This piece of critical writing annoyed Pauline Kael sufficiently to write the much more widely read “Circles and Squares” in Film Quarterly Magazine, launching a 40-year war for which I was polemically unprepared. The trouble was that the cultural establishment seized on the Sarris-Kael imbroglio as a way to keep critical theory out of a “fun” field like movies. Hence, I was suddenly catapulted from obscurity to notoriety without passing “Go.” Now, almost half a century later, I can refute Bazin’s “genius of the system” argument more succinctly simply by asking: If the “system” was responsible for the good films, then who or what was responsible for the much more numerous bad films?

Still, the “system” in Old Hollywood can be credited with giving its employees longer and more copious filmographies than most in the medium can count on today. Mr. Linklater’s comparatively “independent,” catch-as-catch-can career is a case in point. To begin with, his “Hollywood” was Texas, particularly Austin, which enabled him to find his first subject and the genre that established his identity. He was helped also by a technical versatility in the medium that he acquired without much instruction.

Mr. Linklater was born in Houston, Tex., in 1960, and dropped out of Sam Houston State University in 1982 to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He later parked cars before relocating to the state’s capital in Austin, where he founded a film society and raised funds to make his first film, a short entitled It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1987). Three years later, he released his first feature, Slacker (1991), a series of many brief conversations in constant transit between a shifting mise-en-scène of Austin’s youth culture spinning out of the University of Texas into the outside world. Slacker, widely circulated on the burgeoning film-festival circuit, received a big boost at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, where it was hailed as a generational call to arms for disaffected rebels without a cause.

His subsequent films were more structured and plot-driven than Slacker, though equally youth-oriented. Dazed and Confused (1993) dealt with a varied group of Texas suburban high-school graduates in 1976. Performers like Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Joey Lauren Adams were somewhat lower-billed here, and that new Texas girl, Renée Zellweger, flashed by in an early screen appearance.

Mr. Linklater somehow made his next film, Before Sunrise, in Europe, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as strangers meeting on a train in Vienna and falling quickly and perhaps hopelessly in love on his last night in Europe. Mr. Linklater sustains this fragile conceit—very talky for a 90’s movie—with moderate success. But what’s most impressive in terms of Mr. Linklater’s overall career is his ability to shift gears from his collectivist orientation, with its generational alibis, to the romantic humanism of two such sharply etched individuals.

His next film, subUrbia (the title is gimmicked up in upper- and lower-case pretentiousness), was much darker and more despairing, as a group of alienated 20-year-olds hangs out in a suburban convenience-store parking lot, part of an aimless, growing drug subculture. When an old buddy of the group’s—now a rock star—shows up in a limo after playing a concert in town, the pent-up frustrations explode.

With The Newton Boys in 1998, Mr. Linklater suffered his first out-and-out creative setback. In this period crime saga of four Texas brothers who robbed banks across the country from 1919 to 1924, Mr. Linklater was unable to control the tempo of his material and the conviction in his characterizations. In many current “independent” careers, a flop like The Newton Boys could be the last picture for a director without any commercial blockbusters to his credit.

But at this point, Mr. Linklater’s aforementioned technical versatility came to his rescue with Waking Life (2001), an anime-like cartoon shot in video, but even more realistically enhanced than anime itself. The hyper-cerebral script consists of little more than a young man’s philosophical discussions with numerous people he encounters at random. Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Steven Soderbergh—no stranger to metaphysics in film himself—are among the real people who appear via their enhanced animated replicas.

One factor in Mr. Linklater’s ability to keep his head above water is his ability to work cheap. After all, Slacker, the film that first introduced him to the world, was made from $23,000. I don’t know what Tape (2001) cost, but it couldn’t have been much even with its respectable cast of Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard. It was shot on digital video in a dingy hotel room for all of its 86-minute running time. Can you get any cheaper than that?

Then suddenly and triumphantly Mr. Linklater is back in the system with his first big commercial success in The School of Rock (2003). Off to Paris Mr. Linklater goes to film his brilliant sequel to the 10-year-old Before Sunrise. It is called Before Sunset, and it made the top of my 2004 10-best list. Mr. Hawke and Ms. Delpy managed to be more affecting in the twilight of their affair than they were in its blazing beginning.

And so here we are in 2005, with Mr. Linklater’s Bad News Bears. The important thing is that he has survived and even thrived in a particularly treacherous period in film history. Jean Renoir once said of Leo McCarey that he was the one director in Hollywood who knew and liked people. And I can say much the same for Mr. Linklater, after I think about it a little. This may explain why I liked his version of Bad News Bears perhaps more than I should. There is a moment in Before Sunset in the middle of a long traveling shot in the Luxembourg Garden when Ms. Delpy impulsively reaches out to touch the back of Mr. Hawke’s head while he is turned away from her, but aborts the affectionate gesture when he starts turning toward her. In that short interval, Mr. Linklater has generated the most complex and most intense feelings one can imagine between these two people. It is for such privileged moments that one seeks to unravel the mysteries of directorial style.

There is nothing quite that revelatory in Bad News Bears. But there are many lingerings over communal feelings other directors might pass through more quickly to get to the next giggle or guffaw more efficiently. Mr. Linklater lingers one or two beats longer to let the feelings sink in for an audience. It may not be what the audience wants on all occasions, and it may not work with every story. But I have seen a wide enough range of lyrical expression in Mr. Link-later’s career to accord him an auteurist eminence I seldom encounter these days.

This is not to say that I endorse all the conventional plot contrivances in Bad News Bears. Yet I was a bit surprised by the ending, and wondered both what it was supposed to demonstrate, and how closely it hewed to the original. I remain amused by the complaints of some people less for the profanities uttered by 12-year-olds than for the coach’s exposure of the children to the forbidden delights of Hooters’ waitresses. It reminds me of the indignant mother suing the distributors of the homicidal video game “Grand Theft Auto,” not for all the killings of cops, but for a sex scene hidden among all the homicides. Apparently, it is better for a child to play at shooting policemen than to be exposed to simulated sexual activity.

Finally, let me say, though it has never seemed worth saying, that actors are as much subject to the discriminatory apparatus of auteurist theory as directors. In this context, I dragged myself off to see Bad News Bears despite my misgivings, as much for Mr. Thornton as for Mr. Linklater.

Threesome

Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators, from a screenplay (in German with English subtitles) by Katharina Held and Mr. Weingartner, turned out to be an unusually suspenseful film for me because I didn’t want anything bad to happen to the three co-protagonists, Danuel Brühl’s Jan, Julia Jentsch’s Jule and Stipe Erceg’s Peter. Jan, Jule and Peter are three very likeable non-violent revolutionaries who remain bourgeois enough to mess up a potential ménage à trois when Jan betrays his best friend Peter by falling in love with Peter’s girlfriend Jule and she with him. Instead of devising a now old-fashioned communal design for living à la Noel Coward, Peter flies into a rage while Jan and Jule figuratively hang their heads in shame and guilt. Despite the brilliant performances of the three leads, if this were all the film was about, it would not be worth your time or mine.

As it happens, The Edukators becomes by stages this year’s most articulate statement on film about the current disillusion with politics among young people everywhere in the Western world. But what is most fascinating about The Edukators is that it gives the other side, the ruling class, if you will, an intelligent and devilishly ingenious spokesmen. There is no hope of change, the film demonstrates, for people of good will if they insist on retaining a shred of their humanity and decency. Yet the other way has led in the past to Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

Unfortunately, movie audiences are traditionally unkind to well-meaning but indecisive characters. So it is no surprise to me that The Edukators is not doing well commercially, even on the rarefied art-house level. Hence, it may not get the discerning customers it deserves. The class warfare starts early with Jule, a waitress in an upscale gourmet restaurant, having to endure the snobbery of a picky patron who complains about the inappropriate glass in which an alcoholic beverage is served. In an American movie, the waitress would retaliate with at least a cutting remark. But Jule needs the job to keep her head above water for reasons that we learn later. So she grins and bears the verbal abuse without raising a storm. She later displays her political feelings by grappling with police as they jostle striking workers on a picket line.

Meanwhile, Jule’s two buddies in non-violent revolution, Peter and Jan, engage in a curious nighttime form of rebellion by invading the temporarily unoccupied homes of the rich, drastically rearranging the furniture and other bric-a-brac (without stealing anything), but leaving behind a cautionary note about the occupants’ “days of plenty” soon coming to an end. Jan is the more cerebral and idealistic of the two, and when he discovers that Peter has pocketed an expensive watch on their most recent foray, he angrily throws the watch out the car window.

While Peter is away on a pleasure trip, Jule loses her job for standing by a fired co-worker. Though she has been sleeping with Peter during her employment, she now turns to Jan for consolation. When he reveals what he and Peter have been up to all these months when they are supposedly employed on night shifts, she asks Jan to take her along in Peter’s place to the luxurious home of a man whose Mercedes she wrecked when her brakes failed. Because her license had been suspended, she was compelled by the court to pay the full cost of the Mercedes, which would take five years to pay on her wages as a waitress. When the owner, Hardenberg (Bughart Klaussner), returns unexpectedly, Jan and Jule struggle with him and knock him out temporarily, sending them into such a childish panic that they call up the cooler-headed Peter to come get them out of their mess.

At this point it is clear that they can’t kill him in cold blood, and yet they can’t let him go either. Jan and Jule are guilty also for having betrayed Peter during their merrymaking in Hardenberg’s mansion and swimming pool. The three tie up and gag Hardenberg, and drive up to the deserted mountain cabin owned by Jule’s uncle. At this point, it becomes clear that Jule, Jan and Peter, like most revolutionaries, are not among the most oppressed of the victims of capitalist globalization, but belong in the ranks of the disaffected intelligentsia.

Hardenberg proves to be a wily captive as he describes his youthful experiences as a German revolutionary, and the sexual experimentation that went on in his commune, and by intimating that Jule, Jan and Peter know all about it, he slyly raises Peter’s suspicions about what went on between Jan and Jule while he was away. This causes a temporary rupture between Peter and Jan. But in the end nothing has really changed in the stalemated power struggle. The point is that I fully identified with Jan and Jule and Peter in their collective political despair. Let’s face it: Things are pretty bad, and they’ll probably get a lot worse before they get any better. Still, having survived the “good old days” of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust, perhaps I shouldn’t complain.

Meanwhile, there are two Singer novels and a book-length memoir, initially serialized in the Yiddish-language New York newspaper Forverts, that we may not get to read in translation. Three books that have, in effect, been held incommunicado-or at least kept untranslated and unpublished-in Austin, Texas, in the archives of the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the institution that acquired most of Singer's papers.

It's a complicated situation, and I have conflicting feelings on the question. Do we know whether Singer himself would have wanted these works published, and should our conjecture about a dead author's wishes prevent publication? But despite my awareness of the seriousness of the conflicting positions, call me selfish, but I really want to read them. Even more so now that I've come upon, in a relatively obscure volume of essays by Yiddish scholars ( The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer , edited by Seth L. Wolitz), a single chapter from one of the unpublished novels, Yarme and Keyle . A remarkable, tantalizing chapter translated by Joseph Sherman, the translator of Singer's last published novel, the stunning Shadows on the Hudson .

Judging from that chapter, the novel is a lurid tale set in the world of Jewish gangsters in pre–World War I Warsaw-pimps, prostitutes and white slave traders. And having had a taste of it, I want more, I want the rest, I want someone to rescue this book from Ransom, so to speak, and bring it out in English. The other two, as well.

I know the situation is complex, and probably not reducible to a slogan like Free the Singer 3! They're not being held for ransom by the Ransom Center; they're not being activel y suppressed. But their existence has been known about for several years, and so far no plans by any commercial or academic press to publish them have materialized. Up until now, they have, in effect, been caught up in the struggle over Singer's literary identity, the nature of his dual personae and his attempt to define himself, his work and legacy.

Was he a Yiddish writer or an American writer? Must he be one to the exclusion of the other? Was he a writer who didn't want his works-all first written in Yiddish-to appear in English unless he reworked them with the translators? And if so, should this include even the ones left untranslated after his death?

Was he a writer who believed some of his Yiddish works would be too shocking and lurid for his American audience (and might threaten his post–Nobel Prize persona as kindly avuncular folklorist)? Or was he a writer whose Yiddish works have such an aesthetic primacy and distinctiveness that they shouldn't be read in English-to translate them is somehow a betrayal, an appropriation, of his Yiddish identity and another blow to the magnificent but moribund Yiddish literary tradition, as some Yiddish scholars suggest. These questions date back to the 1950's, when Saul Bellow first brought Singer to the attention of an enthralled English-speaking audience with his translation of Singer's "Gimpel the Fool," a parable of the lost Polish Jewish shtetl world.

I first heard about the unpublished Singer works about three years ago from Greg Curtis, the former editor of Texas Monthly who'd met Singer's translator, Joseph Sherman, in Austin, where Sherman had been doing research in the vast, uncharted ocean of Singer's papers in the Ransom Center. That was when I first heard about the contentious division over the late author's intentions for the untranslated Yiddish-newspaper serializations of his novels and the unpublished Yiddish memoirs, short stories and literary essays: Were the English translations Singer worked on denatured, ersatz, less "authentic" Singer, as some Yiddish scholars contend? Or, as Singer himself liked to say, were the English translations his "second originals"-representing his second thoughts, improvements, what you might call his "final intentions" for his works? After all, he insisted that the basis for all foreign translations of his works should be the English revisions, not the Yiddish originals.

It recalled to me the debate about Shakespeare's purported "original intentions," alleged to be found in some of the earlier published so-called "Good Quartos"-and whether the putative "revisions" in the posthumously published Folio edition of his plays represented his "final intentions." Which versions are more "authentic"? (See my May 13, 2002, New Yorker piece on that contentious debate.)

Since one of the issues in the controversy is the luridness of the content, the wild sexuality evident in Yarme and Keyle , it recalls as well the unresolved debate over whether Shakespeare ever "authorized" publication of his sonnets. There are some scholars who argue that they were printed without his permission, that he never would have authorized publication because of the transgressive nature of the homoerotic love relationships in the poems. Assuming just for the sake of argument that this were true, if we learned, in fact, that Shakespeare had not wanted them published, would we want to banish them from memory, unpublish them in our minds, take them out of circulation? If a copy had only turned up after it had been established that they were "unauthorized," should publication have been suppressed? How much deference is due the dead in such cases? Barring a decisive séance (of the sort with which Singer peppered his stories), can we be sure of Singer's intentions?

When I spoke by phone with Seth L. Wolitz, editor of The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer , a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Texas, and a specialist in the unpublished Singer, he spoke of evidence that Singer had changed his mind about allowing an English-speaking audience to read the frank, erotic prose of Yarme and Keyle . (Just to put it in perspective, on the evidence of that single translated chapter, it's not as explicit as, say, the unpublished Edith Wharton pornographic fragment that Yale's R.W.B. Lewis discovered and published as an appendix to his Wharton biography. But it is , in some ways, more emotionally obscene).

The evidence that Singer changed his mind, Mr. Wolitz told me, is that a partial English translation had been found attached to clipped chapters of the original Forverts Yiddish version. The gaps and blank lines in the English version indicate it may have been in the process of being prepared for Singer's revisions and alterations for publication purposes. There is speculation that Singer changed his mind about publishing Yarme and Keyle in English after the 1978 Nobel Prize made him into an icon of sentimental shtetl culture. (There's a lot of resentment and envy of Singer among Yiddish writers and Yiddish scholars, who see him as one of the fortunate few-and not necessarily the worthiest-who escaped the living death of most untranslated Yiddish literature, the death of perishing unread in a dying language. That in doing so he re-made, polished, his image in English. It all stems from the bitter sadness that the death of Yiddish civilization and literature at Hitler's hands has bred. Which is why Cynthia Ozick's sad, brilliant story "Envy; or Yiddish in America"-said to be based on Singer and his less fortunate, untranslated Yiddish rivals-is so relevant.) Which Singer do we listen to? The one who seemed to want to see Yarme and Keyle translated, or the one who seemed to change his mind?

The fact of three unpublished Singer books kept beyond the reach of his non-Yiddish speaking readers has put Singer's longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in a delicate position. F.S.G. editor in chief Jonathan Galassi told me that they have sought to bring out English editions that reflect the kinds of changes Singer traditionally made during the translation of his books-stylistic changes, editorial revisions and the like.

And with Singer no longer around, Mr. Galassi said, they can't be sure they're following his wishes in publishing translations of the unrevised Yiddish manuscripts. I got the impression that the fairly shocking sexuality of the material, at least in Yarme and Keyle , may have been a factor. The erudite Mr. Galassi, a distinguished translator himself, used the French word pudeur (modesty) to hint that there was a bit of an embarrassment factor involved in its explicitness.

F.S.G. did publish Shadows on the Hudson , a post-Holocaust novel of theodicy which, to me, is more profoundly shocking in the defiant, heretical challenges its characters hurl at a God who let Hitler have his way. Shadows was translated by Joseph Sherman without Singer's assistance and, Professor Wolitz told me, many scholars of the purist Yiddishist faction argue that Sherman's translation of Shadows on the Hudson is closer to Singer's voice and spirit in his Yiddish originals than any other translated work aside from Satan in Goray . But did Singer want his works in English to be that close? If he, for whatever reason, wanted to give himself a different artistic persona in English-make himself a "second original"-shouldn't he have that right, some have asked.

The ambiguity of the question is there in that phrase for his English translations: "second originals." While I believe Shadows , in Sherman's translation, may be one of Singer's greatest works in English, F.S.G. received criticism in some quarters for translating it and publishing it at all. While The New York Times ' daily book critic Richard Bernstein said that Shadows had "a strong claim to being Singer's masterpiece," in The New York Times Book Review , Lee Siegel suggested that the translation, "in what appears to be its unadulterated serial form, of this shapeless lump does a keen disservice to the author …" In any case, as things stand, F.S.G. has no plans to bring out the three Singer books languishing in the Ransom Center, although Ilan Stavans told me that some of the unpublished short stories may appear in the Library of America edition.

My proposed solution is that, if F.S.G., for understandable reasons, is being cautious, an academic press (or perhaps the Forward itself) should arrange for Joseph Sherman to complete his translation of Yarme and Keyle , which would at least allow those of us who don't read Yiddish some access-even at one remove-to an aspect of Singer's imagination that shouldn't be, in effect, suppressed by inaction and scholarly wrangling. Contextualize the works properly, sure; call them "translated originals" rather than "second originals." But let a larger circle of readers decide what to think of them than has so far been given the privilege of a glimpse. Who knows what parts of Singer's work will be valued most in the future-but without publication in English, Yarme and Keyle may never have a chance to be valued at all by the wider world. While many feel that Titus Andronicus is too lurid and violent to rank with the best Shakespeare, would we prefer not to have it at all?

I found myself drawn into this maze when I was preparing to appear on a panel on Singer's Shadows on the Hudson as part of a symposium on Singer's works organized by the distinguished Yiddish scholar David Roskies (to be held on March 9, from 1 to 5 p.m., at the Synagogue Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side; www.anschechesed.org). My fellow panelists include two very smart writer-critics, Morris Dickstein (author of Leopards in the Temple ) and Jonathan Rosen (author of The Talmud and the Internet ), and while I wrote a three-part series in The Observer on Shadows (reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune ), I felt the need to study up on Singer. And it was thus, as part of my nerdy preparation, that I came upon that chapter, the one that had escaped from Ransom, so to speak, the chapter of the gangster novel Yarme and Keyle in that volume of essays by Yiddish scholars edited by Seth L. Wolitz. A provocative, perhaps even dangerous chapter.

I say "dangerous" because Jewish involvement in the white slave trade (transporting Eastern European women, both Jewish and gentile, to foreign brothels, often in South America) was a feature of anti-Semitic propaganda in the pre-Hitler era. And while it was a subject of other Yiddish writers, even part of a whole prewar Yiddish gangster-novel tradition, Singer wrote this one in the mid-50's, so it was a conscious decision-a post-Holocaust decision-to give us these unsavory, unromanticized Jewish gangsters. But might it have been something he didn't want to share with non-Jewish readers (or, anyway, non-Yiddish readers)?

So reading the chapter-even after reading both Professor Wolitz's and Joseph Sherman's thoughtful contextualizing introductions-still felt, well, transgressive.

Anyway, the chapter is an immersion in a private hell that gives us a Singer who is not the avuncular Yiddish folklorist who wrote tales of 17th-century Poland, but rather a novelist of raw and degrading 20th-century sexuality, the Singer who is a darker, more complex (at least as erotic, if less explicitly obscene) Henry Miller.

You get the flavor of it from the way Mr. Sherman introduces the main characters:

"At thirty-two, Yarme is … an experienced smuggler and pimp. He is married to Keyle, nicknamed 'Red Keyle' because of her fiery red hair, who at twenty-nine has gone through service in three brothels and is an eagerly sought prostitute …. they have an 'open' marriage which leaves each of them free to have sexual relationships with others on the sole condition that they keep no secret from each other."

Needless to say a recipe for jealousy, violence and disaster.

"The violence and immorality of the world they inhabit," Mr. Sherman goes on, "is dramatically illustrated in the opening moments of the novel: Keyle paying a sick-bed visit to a fellow criminal, Blind Itche … is dragged into his bed and raped by Blind Itche, who years before had been the first to take her virginity …. The night after visiting Blind Itche, Yarme and Keyle go to the Yiddish theater, where Yarme encounters Stumping Max, a forger and thief … now chiefly engaged in the white slave trade." Stumping Max wants to set up Yarme and Keyle in the South American sex trade.

Despite this sensational material, Mr. Sherman argues, Singer wasn't merely seeking sensation. The Yiddish gangster-novel genre had a higher purpose: A whole set of Yiddish writers before and after World War I set out to rectify "what they regarded as falsification by their more 'respectable' counterparts whom they believed guilty of hypocrisy … to indict through their fiction what they despised as bourgeois gentility … to present the Jewish world of Eastern Europe as 'normal.' Displaying shtetl Jews in the grip of the same proclivity for criminality, erotic sexuality and violence as their non-Jewish compatriots."

But, as Mr. Sherman also notes, the Holocaust vaporized the "normality" of that culture-and after the Nobel Prize, the demystifying intention of such a novel may, in Singer's case, have led him to believe that it might have compromised what Sherman calls the post-Holocaust "project of his whole writing career-to memorialize the dead world of Polish Jewry." And compromise as well his own persona, "the wise and lost representative of an annihilated world. For most of his readers in English, Singer's presentation of that world was a tribute to its piety and sanctity." This novel is not.

Yes, other Singer novels are filled with evil and sin; as Harvard's Ruth R. Wisse points out in her introduction to Satan in Goray , "Singer had devised [his] vocabulary for evil a decade before the Jews of Europe were destroyed." Still, in Singer's novels set in the shtetl past, evil tends to take the form of imps, dybbuks, evil spirits and folkloric devils who preyed upon the pious, exacerbating the Evil Inclination. But in novels like Shadows and, it appears, Yarme and Keyle , the evil practices come from within , from a degraded human nature-a degraded human nature that could be misconstrued as a degraded Jewish nature. In certain respects, it's similar to the Shylock problem.

So one can understand the reservations, the pudeur , that surrounds this aspect of Singer's work. But I think, on balance, the more we know about this remarkable genius, the better-even if it means that what we know is contradictory and conflicting and transgressive and embarrassing to some.

Not knowing Yiddish, I'm not qualified to discuss the novel's aesthetic quality in the original. But if the issue is anti-Semitism, there is a case to be made that the struggle against it is better based on envisioning Jews as "normal" rather than as specially virtuous. Normal with flaws and gangsters, just like other ethnic groups.

In any case, the other two unpublished books don't seem to represent the same kind of problem. Not that they necessarily "uplift the race," so to speak. There is one called The Sinful Messiah , about the followers of Jacob Frank, an 18th-century "false messiah" similar in some ways to the more famous 17th-century false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, the one Singer wrote about in Satan in Goray . Similar certainly in Jacob Frank's betrayal of his Jewish followers by leading them into the Catholic Church (Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam). The fact that Singer returned to this theme of hysterical belief and betrayal, to the false messiah as a "Jewish response to catastrophe" (the subject of an important study by Professor Roskies called Against the Apocalypse ), doesn't necessarily mean he's repeating himself. According to Professor Wisse, "this time Bashevis highlighted the kind of dramatic and erotic adventures [the orgiastic behavior of Frank and his followers] that he had curbed in Satan in Goray ." Which is the "real" Bashevis-the one who "curbed" himself, or the one who didn't?

The last of the Ransom Three is said to be an autobiographical work dating from the early 1980's. Pretty tempting.

But let me give you the flavor of what is probably the most problematic of the three, Yarme and Keyle . The second chapter opens after that wild night with Stumping Max, with whom Keyle is far too familiar for Yarme's taste. It's a morning that begins with mutual remorse. (The chapter has the flavor of a dark, erotic, mirror-image Romeo and Juliet -Romeo and Juliet in Hell, or at least in the "Nighttown" whorehouse episode in James Joyce's Ulysses .) Anyway, here's one passage:

" … After Keyle had sobered up, she'd wept bitterly, kissed [Yarme's] feet and sworn by her dead mother's memory that if he didn't forgive her, she'd go straight to the Kalisz railroad line and throw herself down on the tracks."

A little derivative, that bit, but then we get to a signature Singer touch, the fusion of sex and the occult: "When Yarme finally took her back to bed, she proved to him that he wasn't yet familiar with all the cunning tricks she knew for arousing and satisfying a man. Yarme demanded to know who had taught her all these skills, and among the names of pimps and thieves, Keyle mentioned a clairvoyant who owned a black mirror that paraded images of lost husbands and former lovers as well as of the dead who yearned to couple with those who lusted for them."

That's an image that Yarme-and I-will not forget for a long time. A typical Singerian twist on the nostalgic, warm and fuzzy view of the dead perpetuated by many religious and afterlife occultists.

The dead have not lost their appetite, Singer suggests. They don't want to tell us reassuring things about the afterlife. They want to fuck us.

The idea of the dead lusting for their lost love partners gives a new twist in a black mirror to the notion of both the afterlife and this life. It's Singer holding up a black mirror to afterlife nostalgia-and perhaps, in a sense, nostalgia for another kind of dead: the dead and dying words of the Yiddish language itself. Death is sometimes referred to as a "translation" to another realm. For the embittered and envious Yiddish writers in Cynthia Ozick's story, translation (into English) is life: the difference between life and death, between life with an afterlife and life without one, for their work. For Singer, translation represented the divide between his two personae, his first and second "originals."

I'm conflicted. I don't know what side of the divide I should be on, in this contention. But I know I want to read more of Yarme and Keyle .

Please, someone (some university, the Forward , whoever): Give Joseph Sherman the wherewithal to release Yarme and Keyle from captivity in Texas. Bring them back to their great-grandchildren. Bring them back to New York, to the Upper West Side, where Singer conjured them up. Bring them home.

A recent study, sponsored by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and conducted by professors at Harvard University, found that New Yorkers get considerably less bang for their Federal tax buck than residents of most other states. As The New York Times recently reported, for every average New Yorker who paid $5,676 in Federal taxes in the 1998 fiscal year, the state received only $4,840 in Federal money. Which means an average of $846 per New York family is being swallowed up somewhere inside the Beltway instead of being converted to new schools, roads and everything else funded by Washington. Meanwhile, in several Southern states, residents get more money back from the Feds than they pay in taxes, because Southern legislators have built power bases inside those boring committees that just happen to control Federal spending. Our elected officials are too busy trying to crawl into Tim Russert's lap to do what should be their No. 1 priority, namely, protecting the state's self-interest in matters of finance and infrastructure.

Simply put, our Congressional delegation is a squabbling, dysfunctional brood. The great legislators of the past, such as William Green, Samuel Stratton and Joe Addabo, always made sure New York got its share of Federal pork. At the very worst, the New York-Washington money balance should be a wash. And when one considers how many international business people, artists and tourists come to America solely to experience New York City, the tax imbalance is even more absurd.

But it would take a few dedicated public servants to fix things. And surely you don't expect New York's delegation to turn down a parade or dinner party, do you?

John McCain, Party Crasher

Every four years, when the nation embarks on a Presidential campaign, New York takes its place on the national stage as the capital of corrupt politics. While other states allow for competitive Presidential primaries, New York's election laws actually serve as a barrier to democracy.

New York is about to be embarrassed again. Senator John McCain of Arizona has emerged as the leading challenger to Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. Mr. McCain is giving the political scion a run for his money (and given how much money Mr. Bush has, that's no small accomplishment) in New Hampshire. But, wouldn't you know, New York's Republican establishment is building a cozy little bunker in which its chosen candidate, Mr. Bush, may take refuge if he is defeated up in the Granite State. His allies in New York are certain to do all they can to keep Mr. McCain off the ballot in the March 7 primary.

The party establishment will use the state's election laws to keep insurgents off the ballot. Mr. McCain has to collect as many as 890 signatures in each of the state's 31 Congressional districts, and must have a statewide total of at least 5,000 signatures. Given how easy it is to have a signature thrown out, candidates are advised to collect at least double the number. The Republican Party used election law loopholes against Bob Dole in 1988, when George Bush was the organization's choice. Compare New York to California and Connecticut, which automatically grant ballot status to major candidates.

Mr. McCain hopes to be on the ballot in about half of New York's Congressional districts. That would be a disgrace, and that's a best-case scenario. The candidate also says, with reason, that he wants to sue to get on the ballot, which would shine yet more unflattering light on New York's primitive methods. Gov. George Pataki ought to call on Republicans to pledge they will not challenge Mr. McCain's petitions. Only then will New York have something it hasn't had in a while: a truly democratic Republican Presidential primary.

The Skinny on Models

It's an accepted bit of pop-psychology lore that the exceedingly thin models pictured in fashion magazines do terrible damage to a young woman's sense of bodily self-esteem. The same way that investigators always seem to expect to find pornography stashed in the homes of depraved criminals, society sees the fashion magazine business as complicit in the prevalence of eating disorders among America's female youth. But a new study, reported in the American Psychological Association's Monitor , indicates that overexposure to Kate Moss and other rail-thin beauty icons won't push a girl into dangerous dieting or hating her own body, unless she has a pre-existing body image problem from childhood.

In a study led by Eric Stice, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, 200 girls ages 13 to 17 were divided into two groups. One group received a 15-month subscription to Seventeen magazine, the other did not. The researchers found that girls who experienced masochistic emotions after looking at the highly paid ectomorphs were the same girls who had earlier reported a low body image and a lack of emotional support from friends and family. The tendency toward dieting, depression or bulimia was already present.

Sixty percent of the young women did not seem to be affected by having Seventeen on their night table. Family, friends and boyfriends have a much greater impact. "Feedback from these sources about body size is more personal," said Mr. Stice. In fact, it may be the words in the magazines which are truly dangerous. Forty-one percent of the girls said that fashion magazines were their No. 1 source of information about dieting and health.