Customer Reviews

Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album

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It has a little of everything in it, but there's something weirdly cheap and dated about Library of America's Singer album, a companion to their publication of Isaac Balshevis Singer's collected work in three volumes. It's almost as though they were going in this case for the coffee table crowd. They have dragooned in a motley group of authors to respond to Singer's work, and the results are predictably up and down. Sometimes I had the feeling the exact same contributors could have been set upon to write appreciations of some other bygone figure, say Fanny Brice, and come up with the same kind of verbiage that fills column inches. I did very much like Jonathanb Safron Foer's appreciation of Singer. That boy is like the Human Litmus Paper of Jewish writing, sucking up even that which he cannot understand.

Singer's first story "Old Age" was written when he was still a young man, in 1925. He moved to the USA in 1935, and his first years were difficult ones. SATAN IN GORAY was written in Warsaw, while THE ASHKENAZY BROTHERS was written in Brooklyn. The book is jammed full of bright pictures of Singer looking puckish and cheerful, rather like Isaac Stern. Ilan Stavans, the world's greatest authority on Singer, has edited this volume, not always to maximum effect, but I can imagine it was kind of a rush effort trying to maximize on the impact of Singer en masse.One photo looks like Singer lived in the apartment of Henry Darger, there is so much "clutter" it's surprising either was able to get any work done at all.

The best thing about this short book is the photographic documentation of the imp that inhabited Singer. One can't exactly say that the photos show the twinkle in his eye, since in at least one ID photo, IB Singer wore dark sunglasses. There's a beautiful full spread color photo of his work room, about which Singer used to joke "I can say I have accomplished vone thing in my life, my chaos has reached perfection." (The quote is from Dvorah Telushkin's Singer biography). I didn't find the mini-essays particularly interesting, with the exception of Cynthia Ozick's.