Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer
384Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer
384Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
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 |
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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
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 DreamsA 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 |