Volume 45, Number 7 · April 23, 1998
Laughter in the Dark
By Alfred Kazin
Shadows on the Hudson
by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translated from the Yiddish by Joseph Sherman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 548 pp., $28.00
Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life
by Janet Hadda
Oxford University Press, 243 pp., $27.50
In 1935 Isaac Bashevis Singer, a thirty-one-year-old Yiddish writer from Warsaw, arrived in New York so unsure of his prospects that he traveled on a tourist visa. Although he was lucky to escape the German occupation of Poland and the Holocaust, he did not anticipate the destruction of Polish Jewry any more than did other Jews born into strictest orthodoxy. He had been brought up in a wholly rabbinical milieu so insulated from the common life of Warsaw, from secular Jews, their modern culture, and their struggle against established, Church-sanctioned anti-Semitism that he knew Polish life less than he did the Bible, the prayer book, and the Talmud.
Review, 3409 words
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