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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An unsophisticated but believable portrait, December 7, 2006
This review is from: Isaac B. Singer: A Life (Hardcover)
Isaac Bashevis Singer appears in this biography like many of his characters from his stories and novels. He is suspended between the narrow world of Talmudic and Hassidic Judaism in Poland and the wider world of secular knowledge and learning, unable really to choose between them. He is no saint but his sinner status, largely based on finding women irresistible, is not very great since his sins seem more imaginary than actual. The stories he wrote on Krochmalna Street in pre-Holocaust Warsaw were about Jews tormented by demons, poverty, crime, and gentile hatreds. Those he wrote after coming to America were about Jews tormented about the Holocaust they had lived through or heard about.
There are few saints here, even among the mullah-like rabbis, and lots of ordinary people who could be called sinners if they had really achieved anything sinful beyond greed and lechery.
Yet the story of Singer is very helpful in understanding his outstanding achievement in fiction. He wrote in Yiddish, a dying tongue and one close to extinction but he understood that translation into living modern languages would help his reputation; the result was finally a 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. The story of his going to Stockholm to meet the King of Sweden is told charmingly and wonderfully, as are many other incidents in his long life.
The author, Noiville, is not a psychologist and her explanations are happily not clinical but based on common sense observation. Singer would not have liked to be subjected to psychological analysis. It was enough for him to be known to have suffered like everyone else from God's insufficient concern with what men and women really need.
This biography will be superseded some day but for the time being it is a very good introduction to a very fine author.
I wish the author had mentioned what I like the most about Singer. In his novel Sosha he remarks that while his people had lived for about 700 years in Poland they knew no Polish nor any other modern language but only Aramaic and Hebrew; they studied no modern books but only the Talmud which concerned itself with the proper celebration of liturgical matters in a Temple which had been destroyed 1900 years ago. This brief description of the fossil-like nature of rabbinic Judaism is priceless and could only have come from the pen of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Further insight into the life of a Master, November 19, 2006
This review is from: Isaac B. Singer: A Life (Hardcover)
This biography is another contribution to the growing Literature about the Yiddish language master who is arguably one of the world's greatest short- story writers. Noiville a LeMonde correspondent who published this book originally in France in 2003 has her work elegantly translated here by Catherine Temerson. She does not aim at a comprehensive study but rather one which illuminates certain points of Singer's life, including his childhood background, his revolt against Orthodoxy, his dedication of his life to two passions, Women and Literature- his devotion to Yiddish, his complex depiction of world's lost, his literary genius.
In one of the many interesting anecdotes Noiville tells of the four -year old Singer amazing his mother with descriptions of the place they left when Singer was only one year old. His genius at observing and above all remembering would go with him all his life and help him bring back the lost worlds of his childhood and youth when he wrote about them years later in America.
Singer was many many things, an improbable collection of one who had rejected Orthodoxy and yet somehow knew more about Jewish life and practice, and cared more than almost any other writer I can think of. No one I think compares to his 'inner Jewishness' his feeling for every nuance of Jewish life and culture. His tremendously lively imagination confronted the most perplexing of philosophical questions about the meaning of human life. He lived at times in deep depression and yet a capacity to surprise and startle with the most powerful perceptions of life. His depictions of misery and suffering of the Jews of pre- war Poland are part of his providing a picture of a world which was to be lost.
This book is a valuable contribution to what will hopefully be more works about this great master of modern Literature.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fine short intro to the life of IB Singer, December 31, 2006
This review is from: Isaac B. Singer: A Life (Hardcover)
When I started this book, I thought "this is just a collation of information from Singer's own autobiographical essays, along with some information from the biographies that have been published." By the second chapter, my opinion hadn't dramatically changed, but my appreciation of what Noiville had accomplished was much higher. This fine, short bio summarizes many strands of Singer's psychological complexity, whose own internal conflicts were amplified by his relationship with his older brother, his first translator (Saul Bellow), and surprisingly, even extended to his relationship to Yiddish. I learned for the first time that not only did Singer extensively revise and modify his stories as they were moved into English (this was well-known), but he has forbidden that translations be made of the Yiddish versions, and all foreign translations use the English texts. "A writer who gives up the text he has produced in his own language, a very strong, subtle, linguistically rich text; who forbids using it, consigns it to the dust, dooms it to oblivion..." (p98, quoting Henri Lewi). I may track down a recent book, edited by Seth Wolitz, called The Hidden IB Singer (2001). I also found a list of IB's favorite books (on p161): second only to the Bible, is "The Best of Pearls, by Moses Hayyim Luzzato", above Crime & Punishment (3rd), and Knut Hamsun's Pan (8th).
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