Volume 6, Number 12 · July 7, 1966
Family Troubles
By Dan Jacobson
In My Father's Court
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 307 pp., $4.50
The memoirs collected in this new volume by the celebrated Yiddish novelist and story-writer fall into two groups. There are those referred to in the title of the book, which describe the people and the problems that came before the rabbinic court conducted by the writer's father in a poor Jewish quarter of Warsaw more than half a century ago. The other group of memoirs simply tells us about some of the events in the childhood and boyhood of the writer; in fact, the latter half of the book, having a strong element of continuity, comes close to being a brief, informal autobiography of Singer's earliest years. Partly because they tell a continuous story, and partly because each episode is written to rather less of a formula, the chapters of straightforward autobiography seem to me more satisfactory than the accounts of the court cases. The book as a whole, it must be said, gives an impression of slightness, even of perfunctoriness in some places; yet it does throw a light of an unexpected kind on Singer's achievements as a writer of fiction.
Review, 1647 words
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