Once upon a time, eager acolytes thought their false Messiah could make their country great again — sound familiar?
On the strange but insistent parallels between Sabbatai Sevi of Smyrna and Donald Trump of Queens
On the strange but insistent parallels between Sabbatai Sevi of Smyrna and Donald Trump of Queens
Enamored of Roth, Mailer and Singer, the English writer viewed Saul Bellow as a sort of father figure
A new book tries to reclaim the legacy of I.L. Peretz
The day Isaac Bashevis Singer returned to Ellis Island was “a beautiful, cold day,” said the photographer Robert A. Cumins. Singer, who was born in Poland, had first set foot there in 1935 as a refugee fleeing antisemitism. Nearly half a century later, in 1979, he returned with a delegation of international Jewish leaders brought…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. “I can say I have achieved one thing in my life,” said Isaac Bashevis Singer. “My chaos has reached perfection!” This is what Bashevis Singer declared whenever…
The journalist, author, and translator Israel Zamir, who died on November 22 at age 85, deserves to be remembered as more than just the son of Nobel prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991). As he wrote in Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a 1995 memoir which is due out in paperback in June 2015,,…
Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century By Anita Norich University of Washington Press, 160 pages, $30 Translators are villains, lechers, traitors. Like the spinster who translates Yankel Ostrover’s stories in Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” they are vain. “Who has read James Joyce, Ostrover or I?” she seethes. “I didn’t…
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel “Enemies, a Love Story” is about Jews who survived the Holocaust, then ended up in the United States in the 1950s to start their lives anew. But how is it possible to carry on after your children were executed by Nazis, your wife was murdered, and you had been hiding in…
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