Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life [Paperback]

Janet Hadda (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 24, 2003

Isaac Bashevis Singer brought the vibrant milieu of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewry to the English-speaking world through his subtle psychological insight, deep sympathy for the eccentricities of Jewish folk custom, and unerring feel for the heroism of everyday life. His novels, including The Family Moskat and Enemies: A Love Story, and his short stories, such as "Yentl"  and "Gimpel the Fool," prove him a consummate storyteller and probably the greatest Yiddish writer of the twentieth  century.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Yiddish scholar and psychoanalyst Janet Hadda takes a bracingly unreverential look at the Nobel laureate too often viewed simplistically as a folksy chronicler of Jewish shtetl culture. Hadda's depiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) as a sophisticated, self-conscious artist won't surprise admirers of The Family Moskat, Yentl, and his other works of fiction. They will undoubtedly be dismayed, however, by her contention--with reasonable supporting evidence--that he was a cold, distant sibling, a cruel husband, and a capricious, manipulative womanizer. Hadda's warts-and-all portrait seems fair, though not overly generous. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is a good introduction to the great Yiddish writer and Nobel prize winner. Clinical psychologist Hadda (Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature, SUNY, 1988) writes from a psychological perspective, which illuminates aspects of Singer's art and life without reducing it to simple causes. She sensitively examines Singer's parents' difficult marriage; his relationship with his brother, Israel Joshua, and sister, Hinde Esther; and their life in Poland. Then she takes up the great years of Singer's writing, after he was in the United States and married to Alma Wassermann. Wassermann's insights and descriptions are especially interesting here. Throughout, Hadda effectively explores Singer's complex and divided personality and the sociological elements in his art. Recommended for Jewish studies and literature collections.?Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (March 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299186946
• ISBN-13: 978-0299186944
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,474,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Paper Bridge, September 19, 2002

By 

Atar Hadari (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life (Studies in Jewish History) (Hardcover)

When Isaac Bashevis Singer first arrived in New York to take up the writing assignments arranged for him at the Yiddish paper the "Forverts" by his more successful brother Israel Joshua, he wrote to a friend in the Warsaw ghetto where all his own baby steps toward an individual literary identity had been taken and was not hopeful: "In spite of everything, it's sad, and it's sad because here in New York I see even more clearly than in Poland that there is no Yiddish literature, that there is no one to work for. There is a crazy Jewish people here which keeps slightly kosher and peddles...and awaits Marxism for the people of the world. But it doesn't need Yiddish literature. We built on a paper bridge."

In a career spanning some sixty further years he did not significantly disprove his initial estimate and his troubled, complex relationship with his Jewish past both theological and familial, his aspiration and despair for the Yiddish language, his desire and contempt for the English audience through translation which was finally to be his only avenue to worldly success, all make his career an oddly emblematic one for the Jew in the twentieth century, seeking to retain an identity but selling it out at the same time. Janet Hadda's "Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Life" gives the outlines and some colour of his travails.

It was only when Israel Joshua died that Isaac Bashevis really came into his own, completing his first - wild, delirious, frenzied, sexual - novel about, significantly, the time of the social order shattering messiah Sabbatai Zevi, "Satan in Goray". Isaac, Hadda tells us, was a strange mixture of his weakly emotional father and coldly tough, rational mother - the grandson and son of rabbis whose father was far less suited to the role of judge and advisor than his mother. His sister, Hinde Esther, also a writer, was a turbulent, passionate, too close and perhaps sexual involvement in the home which Isaac never escaped - though he was cold and callous to her in person in later life, witholding particularly financial help in her difficult post war existance, he surrounded himself with emotional substitutes for her - mad, turbulent women - and what he did for himself he did for his fictional counterparts.

Again and again, in life and in fiction (the same triangle was in his modern set novels "Shadows on the Hudson" and "Enemies: A Love Story", as well as historical ones), Singer finds creative tension, the material for his output and his day to day entertainment, in a triangular state of play, the mistresses alternating, sometimes helping with translations among other duties. One of Hadda's most engaging finds, a Singer story in outline, has Singer's long suffering wife Alma coming to Israel to confront him with his mistress in a hotel. This could not go on, she said. He told her it had been going on five years. She was dumbfounded. Sensing an opening Isaac leapt in, asked her if it had really bothered her at all all of this time, and the three wound up going together to visit retirement homes that might suit the mistress's mother.

There is not enough of this sort of thing. Deep details of the texture and taste of this most sensual writer's life are missing, not just in the sections about the Warsaw writer's world, which justifiably will have evaded the biographer's reconstructing steps by disappearing, but also in New York, a city whose buildings are there, more often than not, and whose neighbourhoods survive, if occupied by new ethnicities, a different time. I know New York and would have welcomed a charting of this late century's Jewish odyssey up the rungs of the city's economic life and out via the career of this writer. But you cannot tell where Singer lived when he wrote which book, in Hadda's account, you can't tell where he walked. Writers, as much as bankers and bricklayers, are creatures of money and time, and what street a book was written on matters as much as its historical wellsprings. A friend of mine, living in New York in the eighties, said he'd see Singer walking some blocks regularly - he walked fast, focused, and unstoppable to where he was going. You were not going to impede this old man from going anywhere.

Hadda's short-comings are most evident where she quotes the interview of Richard Elman, who through a few touches picked up during interview, prises open all the tensions of Singer's relationship with non-Jewish literature and life: he translated Dostoevsky's "The Devils" into Yiddish while in Warsaw and snipes at Alma to keep quiet about it, belittling her favourite German Jewish authors Wassermann and Sholem Ash and her, then smiles at Elman as if it was a game. Hadda the Yiddishist and fellow woman is unable to pick up anything like this juicy from her interviews with Alma or the remaining friends, lovers, haters. She gets from Alma that the Singer marriage was glued together by good sex and that perhaps this was the same for Singer's own mis-matched parents, but this does not compensate for a lack of sensitivity to nuance, an inability to touch the world she is painting. If Singer is as important as she believes, and he did win the Nobel Prize, sniping at his first notable translator Bellow for beating him to it, he deserves a fuller book.