B.’s older brother, Israel Joshua-who had died in 1944. Singer wasn’t half as good a writer as I. She was peddling a tell-all manuscript that promised astonishing revelations and that I deeply regret not having photocopied.Īnd there were the Yiddishists, tiny men in ties and woollen vests, who explained to me that I. Then there was the woman claiming to have been Singer’s longtime mistress-one of many. What’s more, he boasted, when the paper moved from its Lower East Side location to Thirty-third Street and Park Avenue, he had gathered up a manuscript of “Enemies, A Love Story” and thrown it into a dumpster. “He was a pornographer!” This typesetter, an Orthodox Jew and a survivor of several concentration camps, added that he often took it upon himself to edit out the more licentious passages of Singer’s prose. “Of course I knew Singer,” an old typesetter told me, in answer to my eager questions. But it was possible to uncover traces of his presence. By then, he was dying in Florida, his mind erased by Alzheimer’s disease.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was still alive when I began working at the Forward in 1990, though he no longer came into the office to deliver the stories and articles and serialized novels that the paper had published in Yiddish for more than fifty years.
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