Despite an annoying fondness for rhetorical questions and barely serviceable prose, Noiville gets the story told, and...
The life of the late, great Yiddish writer (1904–91), as analyzed by a French journalist and recalled by Singer’s relatives, friends, translators, biographers, critics and literary peers.
Noiville leans heavily on both Singer’s lucid autobiographies and the testimony of such witnesses in depicting the odyssey of a deeply conflicted Jew whose experience of his family’s zealous religiosity and the terrors of two world wars estranged him from his origins. The roots of his complicated sensibility are shown to lie in insistent memories of his fervent (and somewhat ridiculous) rabbi father, powerful pragmatic mother, elder sister Hinde Esther (herself a novelist) and especially his older brother Israel Joshua, a bestselling author who paved the way for his younger sibling’s eventual literary conquest of America (to which Isaac immigrated in 1945). Noiville stresses Singer’s fascination with Jewish folklore and supernaturalism, persuasively linking it to his indifference to religious tradition and his dispassionate fatalism—traits that, when expressed in his fiction, offended Jewish intellectuals far more preoccupied than he with their people’s communal experience of persecution, diaspora and genocide. (The apostate’s lifelong womanizing, indifferent fatherhood and calculating career moves were also frowned upon.) Yet Singer came unforgettably into his own in richly imagined tales of imps and dybbuks, ingenuous everymen and satanic tempters, faithful spouses and cynical adulterers: a roiling gallery of clamoring humanity captured in fabulist stories (“Gimpel the Fool,” “The Spinoza of Market Street”), breathlessly readable novels (The Magician of Lublin, Enemies) and the still-underrated serial autobiography begun with the brilliant In My Father’s Court. Still, dualities and contradictions plagued him to the end, climaxing with a 1978 Nobel Prize, universal adulation and his sad final years endured in the bewildering grip of Alzheimer’s disease.
Despite an annoying fondness for rhetorical questions and barely serviceable prose, Noiville gets the story told, and Singer’s is a good, dark, paradoxical one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-17800-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
The world didn't lose a great journalist when Gloria Steinem focused her energies on feminist activism—but because she was a working journalist (and, from 1968, political columnist for first-person-prone New York magazine), the light bulb goes on right here. This first collection of her writings (also, her first book) leads off with autobiographical comments: on the speaking she's done instead of writing, and how difficult ("a major hurdle in my life") and ultimately rewarding it was (kudos on both scores to her black lecture partners); on her earlier writing career, or the frustrations of frivolous, "girl reporter" assignments; on her first stabs at "telling the truth in public" and other outcomes of a "growing consciousness." From the pre-feminist writing, she includes only "I Was a Playboy Bunny"—a 1963 "exposÉ" of the crippling grind, the miserable pay, the sexual harassment (said a co-worker: "If you can type, what the hell do you want to be a Bunny for?")—and the first parts of a section of campaign reports, 1965-72. It's there, in 1968, that the "Feminist Realization" (born of covering women's meetings) hits home—eliciting the kind of protest that would quickly become a groundswell: "Six months ago I would have been honored by McGovern's invitation to a 'serious' (i.e., male and therefore grownup) political meeting, but full of doubt about whether I could contribute in a 'serious' (male) way. . . . I couldn't admit that any power relationship in life is political: therefore politics for women may be who's doing the dishes, or who's getting paid half the wages that a man would get for the same job, or who's expected to take the roles of service and support everywhere, including in political campaigns." A dozen pages later, after the 1972 Democratic Convention (Chisholm for president, Farenthold for V.P.): "Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers, or mindless policy-makers. . . ." That sense of being in at the creation is diluted by the non-chronological arrangement of the pieces in the remaining two-thirds of the book—pieces that are essentially feminist polemics whether the subject is food (women's smaller share or "Erotica vs. Pornography," (good) Jackie Kennedy or the (bad) heroine of Sophie's Choice. A partial exception is "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)," Steinem's previously unpublished memoir of her mentally-disturbed mother—whom she regards as a victim but also celebrates as a life-force. Still, her particular talent has been for perceiving the feminist angle, in her own writing and for Ms., and spreading that recognition. If some of the ideas here sound hackneyed, she has honest claim to them.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0452257107
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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