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Reviewed by:
  • Isaac B. Singer: A Life
  • Susanne Klingenstein
Isaac B. Singer: A Life, by Florence Noiville, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 192 pp. $23.00.

The jury is still out on the question of whether or not Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was the greatest Yiddish writer in the second half of the twentieth [End Page 155] century, which is to say the last great writer of his murdered culture. He was certainly the cleverest and craftiest of the Yiddish writers living in America. He was incredibly hard-working and self-disciplined, but also brutally self-centered.

Singer’s life is the subject of a new biography by the French journalist Florence Noiville. She is the deputy literary director of Le Monde’s weekly book review. Although Noiville has done some of her research in the United States, notably at the University of Texas at Austin (where the papers of Singer’s earlier biographer Paul Kresh are stored) and in New York, where she looked carefully at the English manuscripts of Singer’s works at Columbia University, her biography is very clearly not the work of a Yiddish literary scholar but of a French journalist whose knowledge of Yiddish and its literary tradition is at best minimal, but probably zero. This is not to say that Noiville’s biography is entirely without merit. Once she hits the decades in Singer’s life that lend themselves readily to the fact-finding methods and interests of a journalist (after 1953), Noiville’s biography is as enlightening as it is entertaining.

Any Singer biographer is massively hampered by the fact that almost nothing pertaining to Singer’s first thirty-one years of life in small-town Jewish Poland and Warsaw (1904 to 1935) has survived. Its people, buildings, and archives have been destroyed. While Noiville in the manner of journalists travels pointlessly to modern Leoncin, Radzymin, and Warsaw to note the total erasure of Singer’s Jewish world, Yiddish scholars, most famously Khone Shmeruk, Ruth Wisse, and David Roskies, in their analyses of Singer’s work, reconstructed his intellectual environment in Poland through surviving newspaper articles, essays, encyclopedia articles, and other literary documents written in Yiddish by Singer’s contemporaries and fellow writers. To this wealth of information Singer’s biographer Janet Hadda added her training in psychoanalysis to compose a portrait of Singer of the utmost psychological and intellectual complexity.

Noiville’s biography makes no use at all of the reconstructive and interpretive work of American Yiddish scholars. She recreates Singer’s childhood and adolescence largely by mining his autobiographical work. She duly notes the tension in the family that arose not only from the mental differences between the reclusive, pious father and the rationalist, active but deeply depressed mother, but also from the older brother’s rebellion against the traditional life of punctilious observance and the sister’s tremendous anger and discontent. But Noiville does not put the Singer family’s unhappiness sufficiently in the context of the extraordinary social and intellectual changes wreaking havoc among traditional Eastern European Jews around the time of First World War. Thus the Singer family’s break-up seems incidental. [End Page 156]

Noiville wants us to like Singer. She almost succeeds when she describes Singer’s “ethics of protest.” His adolescent doubts about the goodness of God, and his life-long resolve to conduct his “private war against the Almighty” connect Singer to an extraordinarily fruitful Jewish literary tradition. That tradition is unknown to Noiville. In her biography Singer’s “ethics of protest” thus appears to be a form of honesty unique to Singer.

Singer’s formative years in Jewish Warsaw between 1923 and 1935, a time of great social turmoil and intellectual vitality, remain oddly flat (since Noiville knows neither Yiddish nor Polish and isn’t really interested in the Jewish literary world). She delineates the parallel rise of Singer’s interest in women and writing. She comments on his work at the journal Literarishe bletter and as a translator of modern novels. But Singer’s all-important friendship with the Yiddish writer Aaron Zeitlin, their founding of the literary monthly Globus, which...

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