Old Truths and New Clichés book review
Old Truths and New Clichés book review: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer - The universal mamaloshen
The essays in this volume may not match Singer’s fiction at its best, but they provide an invaluable supplement to our understanding of this extraordinary writer’s vision
By Alun David
In a 1971 semi-autobiographical short story A Day in Coney Island, Isaac Bashevis Singer offers a portrait of himself as a 30-year-old refugee, transplanted from Poland to New York just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
In his new surroundings, he scrapes by selling stories about demons and dybbuks to the Yiddish press. “Who needs Yiddish in America?” the émigré asks himself, full of doubt and anxiety.
This serious question is not without irony. By the 1970s, Singer was a renowned author, whose novels and short stories, written in Yiddish, had made a powerful case for the continuing relevance of Yiddish culture (in 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature).
His success was not accidental: he worked assiduously with translators and publishers on English versions of his fictions that would appeal to American and international readers.