Chasing That Elusive Old Magician : Memoir by Isaac Bashevis Singer's son is an awkward, sometimes bewitching book : JOURNEY TO MY FATHER, ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER. <i> By Israel Zamir</i> . <i> Translated from Hebrew by Barbara Harshav (Arcade Publishing: $21.95; 256 pp.)</i>

By RICHARD EDER

Dec. 10, 1995 12 AM PT

In 1935, the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer abandoned his wife and little son in Warsaw, came to New York, and eventually remarried. Twenty years later the son sailed from Israel to see him. It was not out of love, Israel Zamir writes, but curiosity and a need to “close the circle.”

“Journey to My Father,” an awkward, revealing and sometimes bewitching book, closes nothing. Instead it circles and circles like a conjuring dance, one that lasted for the next three decades until Singer’s death in 1991. What is conjured up is the son’s fury, pain and enchantment with the elusive old magician he can neither quite forgive nor give up.

Zamir’s ship gets into New York on a winter midnight. It is 14 hours late, he is not sure what his father looks like and he sees nobody who might resemble him. Finally, he spots a man with reddish hair, waiting uncertainly. “Might you be Mr. Singer?” the young man asks. “I might.” “Is it possible that you’re my father?” “It’s possible,” the other replies, and he adds:

“Everything’s possible. You never know if your pranks from bygone times didn’t produce a son who’ll pop up suddenly from across the ocean and demand his share of the inheritance.”

Israel storms off: Twenty years of a bitterly endured abandonment have summoned up precisely the figure he’d imagined, precisely the kind of sardonic apparition that anger, jealousy, lust or revenge invoke in a Singer tale--except that Singer would have added an additional twist. The real father--pale, diffident, uncommunicative--is waiting outside, and father and son take a taxi, almost in silence, to Singer’s apartment on the Upper West Side.

“Journey” records that silent taxi ride. It goes on to record 35 years of encounters, sporadic companionship and considerable collaboration--Zamir translated a number of his father’s works from Yiddish to Hebrew--and a tentative friendship. But the son never quite got close. How do you get close to a writer like Singer? You become one of his characters.

A communist at the time, member of a far-left kibbutz, a brawny, athletic, make-the-desert-flower Israeli, Zamir--who as an adolescent tore up the few letters Singer sent--is everything his pale, unfit mystic of a father is not. A “Luftmensch”--airy intellectual--he calls him patronizingly. Yet over and over, as with that first winter arrival, Zamir’s recollections keep turning into Singer tales.

The first visit came close to being a second abandonment. Zamir wakes up in the apartment the next morning “empty of feeling.” He sees his father come out of the bathroom, thin legs and feet protruding from an old brown bathrobe, and sit down to write “without a word.” Singer is wary, as if fearing any demand on time, on money, on history. Never does he offer an apology for running off and remarrying, and Zamir is too proud to ask for one. Penniless, Zamir is left to his own resources, apart from an occasional dollar his father would hand out.

Over the next three decades there are visits back and forth between Israel and New York, walks, talks and the collaboration of translation. “I had managed to ‘build’ a father for myself,” Zamir writes; but over and over, amid anecdote and recollection, he brings up that occasional dollar. The father points out years later that he paid for the trip, after all. But with blocked Israeli currency, the son retorts. He named him as his translator, says Singer. To save money, says Zamir. He bought a cot and mattress for him to sleep on, Singer protests. Father and son fade; the fabulist Isaac Bashevis Singer takes possession.

Speaking of himself, Zamir can be strained and sometimes clumsy. His anecdotal portrait of Singer, on the other hand, is precious, comic and with an occasional touch of the alarming. There is a glimpse of him as a young man uncomfortably under the shadow of his older brother I. J. Singer, author of “The Brothers Ashkenazi” and a chronicler of ghetto life in a realistic fashion quite opposite to Isaac’s wry and erotic mysticism.

Outgoing and far better-known, I.J. was Isaac’s devoted patron and protector; it was he who brought him to New York and found work for him. He would show Isaac his manuscripts--all this comes from I. J’s widow, whom Zamir meets by chance--while the latter secreted his own. He also secreted any resentment he may have felt, but in a letter Isaac asserts that I. J.’s writing had deteriorated; as for himself, “My silence is better.”

There are glimpses of Isaac in his Upper Broadway neighborhood, feeding the pigeons that would fly down. A policeman tells him to stop; the next day the policeman apologetically hands him a book to autograph. “If a New York policeman asks a Yiddish writer to sign his book there’s still hope,” Singer says.

Years later, though, during the 1967 war in Israel, Singer and Zamir joined a line waiting to give money to the United Jewish Appeal. Some wept; it was not immediately clear whether Israel would survive. The world can not bear another Auschwitz, a rabbi standing in the line insisted. Zamir writes: “My father, tugging at my sleeve, whispered: ‘The world can bear anything.’ ”

Singer could not resist women, and was irresistible himself. McCalls once named him one of America’s 10 sexiest men. It was not his looks, but his wide blue eyes in a pale round face and his limitless interest in hearing women’s stories. Women readers would phone him; if they sounded interesting he would arrange a long talk at Steinberg’s restaurant, his kosher passion pit on Upper Broadway. Alma, his second wife, showed considerable tolerance, though she would interfere occasionally when things threatened to go too far. They went fairly far, though. “My father considered the bed as the culmination of the conversation, only horizontal,” Zamir writes, and goes on to cite one noontime conversation:

“Philosophers in the past tried to neutralize feelings and lust,” Singer mused, “and to ground their thoughts in logic, assuming that everything goes through our brains. Take away our lust and it looks like lettuce leaves. I believe in feelings that turn into lust. I believe that when a man and a woman kiss and declare that they can’t live without each other--that’s the start of a spiritual matter, not just a material one. Our world is so mysterious. You leave your house, meet a woman on Broadway and your life changes. By the way what time is it?”

“One-thirty.”

“I’ve got to go. A woman called me from the Bronx yesterday and swore to me by all that’s holy that, in a cafeteria on Jerome Avenue, she saw Adolf Hitler.”

In his last years, grown feebler, Singer grew more somber. He spoke approvingly of the upsurge of strict Orthodox Judaism. Penitence, he said, “isn’t a rebellion against the pleasures of life but a rebellion against despair”--a thought, whose irony he might or might not have appreciated, that has been voiced in almost exactly the same words by Pope John Paul II (a fellow Pole, after all).

He believed in God, but accusingly. During the Holocaust, he tells Zamir, God “sat there in his Seventh Heaven, surrounded by angels singing loud hymns of praise and glory to Him. The Jews cried out from the ovens, the crematoria, but he didn’t hear. While he was getting praise, we got the gas chambers.”

It has a familiar ring. It sounds, in fact, like the twin notes of angry estrangement and helpless identification that run through this memoir. Zamir is to his father very much as Isaac Bashevis Singer was to God, who when he made man, as Singer once objected, “did not use the best materials.”