![]() ![]() That the world he wrote about, and the Yiddish language in which he wrote, were practically extinguished in the decade after he came to the United States in 1935, only increases the sense that he was a messenger from another world. A large part of Singer’s popularity is certainly owed to the way he lends himself to being read as a folklorist, writing about dybbuks and holy fools in an age-old Jewish landscape. ![]() ![]() ![]() The reputation of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose novel The Magician of Lublin has just been reissued on its fiftieth anniversary, is one a major example of this kind of confusion. A few weeks ago, writing about Antony Polonsky’s history of Eastern European Jewry in the late nineteenth century, I remarked on the way that American Jewish nostalgia and guilt towards the vanished “old world” makes it difficult for us to see that world as it really was. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |