In My Father's Court

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Overview

Like Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction, this poignant memoir of his childhood in the household and rabbinical court of his father is full of spirits and demons, washerwomen and rabbis, beggars and rich men. This rememberance of Singer's pious father, his rational yet adoring mother, and the never-ending parade of humanity that marched through their home is a portrait of a magnificent writer's childhood self and of the world, now gone, that formed him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374505929
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/01/1991
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	526,695
Product dimensions:	6.75(w) x 8.65(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) was the author of many novels, stories, children's books, and memoirs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.

Date of Birth:

July 14, 1904

Date of Death:

July 24, 1991

Place of Birth:

Radzymin, Poland

Place of Death:

Surfside, Florida

Education:

Attended Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw, Poland, 1920-27

Editorial Reviews

"In My Father's Court is no more a book about court cases than Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches is about hunting. For what Mr. Singer has done is to recreate that boiling, God-haunted world of Russian and Polish Jewry that existed within the larger world of Czarist Russia--a sphere that must have seemed to their neighbors puzzling, queer and impenetrable. . . . It was a world that was crumbling, that was ruined in World War I, obliterated in World War II. This memoir brings it to life again, not as a museum piece but with its people and its life intact." -The New York Times Review of Books

"The sort of book . . . only a writer at the height of his powers, firmly in command of his created world, his mind charged with vivid memories, can somehow shake effortlessly out of his sleeve . . . [The writing is] often close to the Biblical directness of feeling that Tolstoy prescribed for the 'universal art of the future.'" -The New Leader

"A world that no longer exists reaches us through one of the greatest literary artists of our time." ― Saturday Review

From the Publisher