Word: singer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lure of prizes helped boost Crimson subscriptions 20 percent, said Crimson Business Manager Margot Singer...
Evidently the imps are powerful enough to influence even a Nobel laureate. Hence the strange ambivalence of The Penitent. This "new" novel was first published in 1973. It exhibits Singer's narrative mastery, but none of his compassion; it offers only one character, Joseph Shapiro, and he is so acrimonious that in an afterword, Singer disavows his own creation: "While I was brought up among extremists who thought and felt like that angry man... I cannot agree with...
...past, Singer fuses two styles: the fabulist confined to his shtetl and the modernist who regards the universe as a stark and enigmatic combat zone. If Joseph Shapiro is disagreeable, he is never less than credible; once again the author displays a talent for mimicry that has previously allowed him to imitate Satan, fools, saints and, on one occasion, a rooster. True, his gift has been squandered on a man with no redeeming features, but for once Singer is not out to charm his readers. He and his penitent seem content to prove the old Yiddish proverb "Going backward...
...double biography, The Brothers Singer, British Writer Clive Sinclair traces that journey back to Poland, where Singer was born in 1904. If a writer's capital is his childhood, Singer is a literary Rothschild, still retailing anecdotes he heard swirling through the streets of Bilgoray and Lublin. Many stories contain transsexual themes-oblique references to his mother and father; Isaac's older brother, Novelist Israel Joshua Singer (The Brothers Ashkenazi), called his parents' marriage "a tragedy, due to the fact that fate transposed genders in heaven." His father, a rabbi, was "soft," his wife was "sharp...
Indeed, in The Penitent he still refers to Israel as "my late brother and master." Sinclair's luminous little volume is hardly the definitive study of the brothers Singer, but in its examination of sources it shows why Isaac has earned the title he once bestowed on another character: the magician of Lublin. Writing in Yiddish, using the demonic forces of art and recollection, he has kept his brother's memory alive, raised a ruined city, given the power of speech to a vanished people and revived an ailing language. Is it any wonder that...