Writer's Spark
RIEMER, JACK
Writer's Spark More Stories from My Father's Court Isaac Basheuis Singer, translated by Curt Leviant New York: Farrar, Straus and GiroiK, 2001, 216 pp., hardcover S23 REVIEWED BY JACK...
...The court not only fed young Singer's imagination, it inspired his later writing career as a Yiddish journalist, critic, and novelist...
...Rabbi Jack Riemer of Congregation Beth Tikvah in Boca Raton, Fla., is the coeditor of So That Your Values Live On (Woodstock, Vt: Jewish Lights), and is chairman of the National Rabbinic Network...
...Singer, the boy with the red sidecurls, spied many of these encounters, sitting unnoticed in the corner of his father's study...
...It also made him forever aware of how many-sided people are, and how complex is the human condition...
...Published posthumously—Singer died in 1991—these tales take us back to Singer's pre-war childhood on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, where the door to his father's study was always open...
...the squabbling, divorced couple who fell in love once again...
...Fascinated by the stories people told, perplexed by his father's decisions, and intrigued by the incredible diversity and mysteriousness of human life, young Singer impressed each story on his memory to take with him for the rest of his life...
...Writer's Spark More Stories from My Father's Court Isaac Basheuis Singer, translated by Curt Leviant New York: Farrar, Straus and GiroiK, 2001, 216 pp., hardcover S23 REVIEWED BY JACK RIEMER More Stories From My Father's Court is a delightful collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer's childhood reminiscences that continue the tradition of In My Father's Court (translated into English in 1966...
...What makes these stories so fascinating is that Singer, as an adult, managed to recapture with great literary skill the child's sense of wonder...
...As the local rabbi, his father's "court" was at once a beit din (court of law), study hall, and therapist's office, and the stream of people he saw— from the freethinkers to the pious, from the rich to the poor—came to him for advice, adjudication, and strength...
...He also adeptly captures the world of Warsaw Jewry—a complicated and wondrous place—where houses of study stood next to houses of ill repute, and observant Jews lived side by side with those on the cusp of leaving Jewish tradition...
...This new volume is filled with the debut English translations of stories originally published in Yiddish in the 1950s in the Jewish Daily Forward...
...It was the boy's mother, the practical one (and often the skeptical one), who tried to keep her husband grounded in the here and now...
...His counsel was the Torah and codes of Jewish law, and it was these holy books that Singer remembers his father bringing close "as if to hide his face from this world and from its lusts and temptations and confusions...
...Throughout it all, Rabbi Singer tried to make sense of the mad world that swirled around him, and to bring a measure of justice to these people who crowded into his courtroom...
...and the old woman desperate to find someone to say kaddish for her after her death...
...There he eavesdropped on the convert to Judaism who became so pious that there was no living with him...
Vol. 26 • October 2001 • No. 5
