Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Dvorah M Telushkin, Dvoran M Telushkin

Overview

In 1975, twenty-one-year-old Dvorah Telushkin wrote a letter to the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, offering to drive him to and from a creative writing class in return for permission to attend the course. The literary master, then seventy-one, accepted the offer, which led to a twelve-year-long apprenticeship for Telushkin.

Throughout Dvorah Telushkin's tenure with Singer, she kept detailed diaries chronicling both their literary efforts and the evolution of their personal relationship. Indeed, Telushkin was the one person to whom Singer tried to teach his craft as a writer. She writes about the great moments in Singer's public life, his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, his fiery encounter with the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, his surprising meeting with Barbra Streisand, who adapted and starred in the movie version of Singer's short story "Yentl." But the private Singer is revealed as well, the "merry pessimist" haunted by despair and torn between the old-world ethic of his Hasidic forebears in Europe and the moral abandon of modern secular man.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060739331
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/15/2004
Series:	Harper Perennial
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Dvorah Menashe Telushkin is a renowned storyteller who worked for twelve years as all-around assistant to Isaac Bashevis Singer. She first studied storytelling at Bard College and then Yiddish at Columbia University. She has performed all over the country and abroad. She lives in New York and is well known at storytelling festivals nationwide.

Read an Excerpt

Master of Dreams
A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Chapter One

House of Yizkor

October 14, 1993. The house is stripped. There is on light bulb clamped onto the closet door in the foyer. Alma is sitting in a beach chair under this solitary light. She is tired. She has auctioned off almost every piece of furniture in the entire home. Hunched over piles of canceled checks, tax forms, and receipts from five and six decades back, she pulls off the rubber band and sighs. "I never knew he was earning such sums." She flips through the papers with bent fingers, then brings a check close to her nose. Reading it, she sighs again. 'And he kept me on such a tight budget all these years."

I pause to listen. Our shadows waver on the vacant walls. Silent languid shadows. After a moment, I run back to the "chaos" room and continue pulling letters from the drawers. I am cleaning out old cracked desks, filing Isaac's papers, and working in his house for nearly the last time. Hundreds of Yiddish manuscripts, notepads filled with ideas for stories, essays and plays, fan mail, and yellowing contracts are still crammed into drawers, spilling out of closets, and bursting from broken, crushed suitcases.

I never wanted to strip away Isaac's house. I never wanted his home dismantled and dissolved. Like my grandmother's house, it was supposed to be eternal, never-ending. But Alma has one month to clear everything out and ship all the papers to the University of Texas. When she told me, "Deborah, I cannot keep all these expenses. I will simply have to give up the apartment," my heart tightened in my chest.

"Do you know what it means to me to give up this apartment?" she laments. "Soon it will be thirty years that we lived here. All our memories are here. Everything connected to our former life. I love this apartment. Everything about it I love."

I do not answer. I loved the house as well, having grown up here in my way. I loved every leaking pen, every thesaurus and word finder, every crumbling page. To ward off my remorse, I create my own cocoon and work at a feverish pace. Hands and face blackened with soot, I am running back and forth between the chaos room, the hallway, and the living room, separating general from Yiddish fan mail, unpublished from published stories, and sorting reviews, labeling rows of boxes, building up a sweat. Some days, I spend up to twelve hours. I am feeling energized. As if some higher destiny has called upon me to clear out the dilapidating castle and close the mansion doom.

The empty bookshelves especially have saddened me. The soul of the house was plucked out and spirited away the day they carried off the books. Alma sold half the books to Florida International University and the other half to a private collector. In total, the two purchasers paid a few thousand dollars for several thousand volumes. I was told the books had not been packed but just thrown into boxes.

I regret that Alma had not thought to offer me some; the collections of Russian, Spanish, and Irish folktales that I had so cherished, his copy of As a Driven Leaf, his worn-out word finder, and Yehoash's Yiddish translation of the Bible. I remember the quote Isaac gave to the publishers: "This vill be like a treasure in every Jewish home."

Instead, I am being offered sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, curtains, and bedspreads. I take two boxes of lace tablecloths, thinking they will be nice for my Shabbos (Sabbath) table ...

Master of Dreams
A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright © by Dvorah Telushkin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Biographical Note	xiii
	Introduction	xv
	Prologue: Master of Dreams	1
Part I	(1975-1977)
1	House of Yizkor	7
2	"I Vant You Should Tell Me Everything..."	16
3	"Bring Me Stories, I Love Stories"	20
4	"So, You Can Type, Dahlink?"	27
5	House of Wonder	30
6	"Aach, Just an Embryo"	37
7	"Qvite an Audience"	40
8	"X"	44
9	Secret Kasha	51
10	"Come In! Come In, My Friend"	53
11	"Mehrilin Mawnraw Is Coming!"	64
12	Enter Charlie	68
13	Courtyard Dance	74
14	Down Broadway	76
Part II	(1977-1984)
15	"I'm Fresh like a Daisy"	87
16	Isaac Sings	103
17	Rachel MacKenzie, the Perfect Lady	109
18	The Balloon	123
19	The Geshray	125
20	"You Are in the Fehctory of Literature"	129
21	"Vith Vone Flame"	136
22	"Do You Heve Here an Account for Singeh?"	145
23	"A Crook and Nothing More"	153
24	"The Baby Is Hehving a Baby"	156
25	Miami, the Faraway Island	163
26	Corridor Dance	172
27	The Prize	174
28	The Bear's Brother	188
29	Gudl the Tailor	194
30	"Excuse Me, I Heve en Appointment vith the Prime Minister"	198
31	"Do Nothing"	201
32	"Vhat Did You Need vith So Much Growing?"	209
33	"Vhat Did You Need vith So Much Yiddish?"	216
34	"There Are No Excuses for the One Who Loses"	228
Part III	(1984-1993)
35	"My Desk Is My Battlefield!"	241
36	A Divided Face	256
37	A Teller of Tales	258
38	Happy Birthday	265
39	The Yarmulke	271
40	The Eye	278
41	"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"	285
42	House of Slumber	295
43	The Salute	299
44	Gilgul	308
45	Lullaby and Good Night	316
46	The Critic	319
47	Broadway Reborn	324
48	The King's Minyan	329
49	House of Light	337
	Notes	341
	Glossary	345
	Note on Transcription	347
	Permissions	349

Editorial Reviews

An honest portrait of a great artist and a harsh man.” — Library Journal

“[A] charming and often poignant memoir...lovely to read, honest to a fault.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Telushkin captures the evolution of her 12-year apprenticeship to Singer ... in this series of poetic vignettes..” — New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Telushkin captures the evolution of her 12-year apprenticeship to Singer ... in this series of poetic vignettes..

New York Times Book Review