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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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