An analytical, unsympathetic portrait of the Nobel Prizewinning Yiddish writer. Drawing on interviews with Singer's wife, translators, and fellow writers, Hadda (Yiddish/UCLA) paints the writer as a deeply alienated and selfish man. Drawing heavily on psychoanalytic theory, Hadda contends that his difficulties began in his Warsaw home, where he identified with his mother, the more rational, pragmatic, and ``masculine'' parent, rather than with his father, the scholarly dreamer. Hadda suggests that his intense relationship with his sister, Hinde Esther, complicated Singer's relationships with women. The sole family member to provide him with consistent affection, Hinde Esther suffered from epileptic fits accompanied by bizarre behavior. ``He wrote in order to fill in the overwhelming void of loss,'' Hadda argues, ``and fill it he did with all the vibrant, expansive, crazy and troubling characters who represented Hinde Esther's disturbing but enlivening presence.'' While Singer freed himself of his family, their demons always followed him and peopled his work. Unable to commit himself to the mother of Israel, his only son, Singer ended up marrying a woman from a wealthy, secular background who did not even know Yiddish. He did not connect much better with men. His relationship with his brother, novelist I.J. Singer, who introduced him to life in America and to the Yiddish daily Forward, was tinged with jealousy and resentment. Singer rarely had kind words for anyone. In fact, as a strict vegetarian, Singer seemed to direct more kindness to animals than to people. The psychoanalytical musings are interspersed with valuable comments about Singer's fiction and characters. But for a livelier and more rounded portrait, turn instead to Israel Zamir's memoir, Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1995). There, Singer comes off as far more human and complex than the cantankerous, cardboard character who emerges here. (17 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-508420-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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