Growing into the writerly life in Warsaw and Benares

Two novels in quick succession. Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Certificate and Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics. The Romantics had everything going for it. A self-conscious literary premise, Benares, postgraduation woes, Civil Service "Mains", Sentimental Education, drifting, the 80s bleeding into the 90s- my own private nostalgic phase in Indian history and an acknowledgment- finally- of stoned foreign hippies who mistake Siddhartha for a crash course on Indian spiritualism. The Certificate on the other hand, promised nothing more than an amusing read. A quirky, ironical novel set in 1922 Warsaw, narrated by a character in a similar stage of life as Samar- of The Romantics. David Bendiger, looking for a Jewish identity outside of hassidism, running away from a rabbinical future, finds himself in Warsaw, penniless, with no place to go except sit up in his crowded in-laws' hovel and a chance lover Sonya who works with dressmakers. Hope comes to David in the form of a certificate that will allow him to travel to Palestine and settle there as a goodwill ambassador from the Diaspora. Who will pay for his travels? Why, a girl called Minna from a rich decadent class of Jews in Warsaw promises to sponsor the trip if he enters into a fictive marriage with her which will enable her to meet her fiance in the Palestine again. And of course, during his brief stay in Warsaw- before his papers are made ready for departure- he falls in with a couple of cynical communist women from whom he rents a small windowless room. Menage a trois of the stuff adolescent dreams are made of, but hardly what would excite a response dipped into a hummus of 'serious literature'.
While Pankaj Mishra's laborious je ne sais quoi narrative meanders around a lot of things, jumping in fits and starts, Singer's narrative is sharp and precise. It's a world someone like me is supposed to know nothing about (unlike Mishra's) but can immediately identify and get hooked. The period is self-consciously literary because it's 1922, the year before Modernism walked out of the closet and Bendiger's flakey pseudo-philosophical leanings, a Nerudaesque yearning for the talent of being poor and the affected, contrived nature of it all is hilarious yet born out of a deep and intimate knowledge of having lived through great sadness. If Mishra's book is a frustrating boat-ride promising a view of the exotic ghats of Benaras from a great distance, Singer's novel is like discovering an early Philip Roth, i.e, minus some of Roth's great pretensions and Portnoy as a writer, not Zuckerman. An early Roth novel that you thought was one of his lost works.