28 February 2010
fish kill... :(
Brazil officials probe cause of 50 tons of dead fish to wash up in Rio lagoon...
Sun Feb 28, 1:36 PM
By The Associated Press
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Thousands of dead fish are washing up on the shores of a popular beachside lagoon in Rio.
News website G1 says workers have cleared nearly 78 tons of fish as today.
There is no immediate estimate of how many died, but several species are involved.
Rio's environmental secretary speculates that increased levels of a harmful algae may be the immediate cause of the sudden die-off Friday.
She tells G1 authorities are still investigating.
The stench of rotting fish has dampened joggers and cyclists' normal enthusiasm for weekend jaunts along the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon's paths.
The 2-square-mile (4.5-square-kilometre) body of water is just north of Rio's Ipanema Beach.
A canal connects it to the Atlantic.
Copyright © 2010 Canadian Press
toll climbs... :(
Quake, tsunamis kill more than 700 in Chile...
1 hour, 39 minutes ago
By Mario Naranjo
CONCEPCION, Chile (Reuters) - A massive earthquake and tsunamis killed 350 people in one Chilean coastal town, pushing the total death toll higher today as the government tried to get aid to hungry survivors and halt looting.
President Michelle Bachelet said at least 708 people had been killed and called for calm as people desperate for food and water looted stores in some areas worst hit by Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake, one of the world's biggest in a century.
Television images showed cars tossed on top of shattered houses and boats lifted far from the waterfront in the coastal towns of Pelluhue and in Concepcion, where 350 deaths alone were reported.
"It's an enormous catastrophe ... there's a growing number of missing people," Bachelet said, adding food and medical aid was being sent to help the roughly 2 million people affected by the quake.
The quake wrecked hundreds of thousands of homes, mangled highways and bridges and dealt a heavy blow to infrastructure in the world's No. 1 copper producer and one of Latin America's most stable economies.
A lack of water, food and fuel sharpened the hardship for the hundreds of thousands of people left homeless, and widespread disruption to the power supply threatened to hamper Chilean industry's recovery.
In the hard-hit city of Concepcion, about 500 km (310 miles) south of Santiago, about 60 people were feared to have been crushed to death in a collapsed apartment block where rescuers worked through the night to find survivors.
The government imposed a curfew in Concepcion and the Maule region Sunday in a bid to stop looting.
Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse a crowd of looters carrying off food and electrical appliances from one supermarket in Concepcion.
Television images showed people stuffing groceries and other goods into shopping trolleys.
"People have gone days without eating," said Orlando Salazar, one of the looters at the supermarket.
"The only option is to come here and get stuff for ourselves."
Concepcion's mayor, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, said the situation was getting "out of control" due to shortages of basic supplies and called for troops to be sent to the city.
AFTERSHOCKS
The quake poses a daunting reconstruction challenge for President-elect Sebastian Pinera, who takes office in two weeks.
Crushed cars, fallen power lines and rubble from wrecked buildings littered the streets of Concepcion, which has about 670,000 inhabitants and lies 115 km (70 miles) southwest of the quake's epicenter.
A string of strong aftershocks have rocked the country and thousands of Concepcion residents camped out in tents or makeshift shelters, fearing fresh tremors could topple weakened buildings.
Some economists predicted a deep impact on Chile's economy after the quake damaged its industrial and agricultural sectors in the worst-hit regions, possibly putting pressure on its currency.
The economic damage from the could be up to $30 billion, equivalent to about 15 percent of gross domestic product, said Eqecat, a firm that helps insurers model catastrophe risks.
Chile's fourth-largest copper mine El Teniente, which accounts for more than 7 percent of national output, and the nearby Andina mine were due to resume operations Sunday but analysts feared power outages could still curtail supplies.
There was no information available Sunday on two Anglo-American mines where power outages have halted production.
State television said Santiago's airport had started to receive international flights for the first time since the quake struck.
The quake triggered tsunamis as far afield as Japan and Russia, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or serious damage.
(Additional reporting by Simon Gardner and Alonso Soto in Santiago and London bureau; Writing by Stuart Grudgings and Helen Popper; Writing by Kieran Murray)
Cyclists look at debris in front of the Contemporary Art Museum (MAC) after a major earthquake in Santiago 28 February 2010.
The death toll from Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake already stood at 400 before news of the devastation in Constitucion.
The quake, one of the world's most powerful in a century, has dealt a serious blow to infrastructure in the world's No. 1 copper producer and one of Latin America's most stable economies. REUTERS/Sebastian Escobar (CHILE - Tags: DISASTER SOCIETY)
tsunami...
Tsunami waves hit Pacific regions after Chile quake...
28 Feb '10
By Yoko Nishikawa
SENDAI, Japan (Reuters) - Tsunami waves of up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) hit far-flung Pacific regions from the Russian far east and Japan to New Zealand's Chatham Islands today after a powerful earthquake struck Chile, but there were no reports of injuries or serious damage.
Hundreds of thousands of residents in Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Russia's Kamchatka, were told to evacuate after one of the world's strongest quakes in a century hit Chile on Saturday, killing more than 300 people.
Japanese officials had warned that tsunami waves of 3 meters or more could strike the country's Pacific coast and ordered or advised around 630,000 households to evacuate.
"I feel the power of nature.
"The tsunami is coming from thousands of kilometers away," said Akio Yone, a 70-year-old retired fisherman, as he watched from high ground on a chilly, windy evening on the outskirts of Sendai, northern Japan.
The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) put the country's highest tsunami at 1.2 meters in the port of Kuji, northeast Japan.
Smaller waves hit a swathe of the country from the small island of Minamitori 1,950 km (1,200 miles) south of Tokyo to Hokkaido island in the north.
The JMA later downgraded its warning of a "major tsunami" to a tsunami of around 2 meters, but said residents should not let down their guard.
"Carelessness could be the biggest enemy," Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama told reporters earlier in the day.
It was Japan's first major tsunami warning in 17 years and only the fourth since 1952, the JMA said.
Train services were halted in many areas along the Pacific coast, many highways were closed and there was minor flooding.
Two nuclear plants in the area were operating normally and Japan's Nippon Oil Corp said its 145,000 barrel-per-day Sendai refinery was also functioning as usual.
Police cars and fire trucks patrolled coastal roads and fishing boats, seeking to avoid any tsunami, headed out to sea under gray skies, with snow flurries in some areas.
HISTORY OF TSUNAMI
Japan is no stranger to tsunamis.
In 1896, a magnitude 8.5 earthquake and tsunami left more than 22,000 dead in northeastern Japan.
Another of magnitude 8.1 hit the same region in 1933, killing 3,064.
In May 1960, a tsunami struck the coasts of Hokkaido and other northern Pacific coastal areas after an earthquake in Chile, killing around 140 people.
Since then, many harbors have had sea gates installed to try to protect from tsunami and storms.
Tadao Saito, 77, recalled the 1960 tsunami as he pointed to the sea from high ground in a coastal town near Sendai.
"At that time we could see the bottom of the sea," he said.
"A lighthouse was pushed over, and lumber and barrels were washed away, and the wave was very fast.
"But compared with that, it is a small wave today."
The first waves to hit New Zealand were reported at the remote Chatham Islands, around 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of New Zealand, with surges of up to 1.5 meters measured, the Civil Defense Ministry said.
A resident on one of the smaller islands in the group, Pitt, said the surges were continuing and getting bigger.
"The bay empties right out. It takes about a minute and a half and then it surges back in, in about the same amount of time," Bernadette Malinson told Radio New Zealand.
"The surges have been getting bigger -- at least 2 meters at present."
Authorities in Russia's far eastern Kamchatka region lifted a tsunami alert after a series of small waves appeared to cause no damage, a spokeswoman for the Emergencies Ministry said.
A tsunami hit beaches in eastern Australia but there were no initial reports of damage.
Officials issued an alert for most of the east coast and eastern parts of the island state of Tasmania, but said there were no concerns about major inundation.
The Philippines canceled a tsunami alert on the eastern seaboard after the threat dissipated.
Hawaii dodged serious damage on Saturday when a tsunami merely lapped ashore, although residents were warned to stay away from coastal areas because the ocean could remain unsettled for several more hours.
(Additional reporting by Yoko Kubota, Elaine Lies, Osamu Tsukimori, and Chisa Fujioka; writing by Linda Sieg; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
A ship sails as a tsunami wave is seen along the Pacific coast in Shichigahama, Miyagi Prefecture, northern Japan, 28 February 2010. REUTERS/Toru Hanai
storms kill... :(
Storms rip through Europe, kill up to 50 in France...
1 hour, 37 minutes ago
By Astrid Wendlandt
PARIS (Reuters) - Storms swept through western Europe at the weekend, killing up to 50 people in France, and threatening further damage as powerful winds and torrential rains moved north, officials said.
The storms ripped through cities, uprooting trees and street signs, wreaking havoc on rail networks and forcing hundreds of flights to be canceled at airports like Paris and Frankfurt.
Three people were killed in Spain, two in Germany and one in Portugal, but France was the worst hit as heavy rains, strong gusts of wind and high tides destroyed Atlantic coast sea walls, killing 25 people in the town of l'Aiguillon sur Mer alone, the mayor told French television.
"It is a natural catastrophe," French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told BFM TV, estimating the total death toll in France at between 45 and 50, and warning high tides could cause further damage.
Hortefeux said the French government had set aside 1 million euros in immediate relief aid, and Budget Minister, Eric Woerth, issued a statement saying victims could seek tax relief.
The French regions of Vendee and Charente Maritime bore the brunt of the storm and were placed on flood alert along with parts of Brittany.
But centuries-old trees were also uprooted in the gardens of the Versailles palace near Paris, according to France Info radio.
Weather forecasters said the storm, named Xynthia, had moved up to northeast France and Belgium and would hit Denmark next.
Meteo France said the storms seemed less fierce than those that battered France in December 1999, killing 92 people.
SEEKING REFUGE ON ROOF
"Policemen are currently touring flooded houses and some of their inhabitants were found drowned," said Frederic Rose, cabinet head of the Vendee Prefect.
A woman in l'Aiguillon sur Mer in Vendee, where a sea wall collapsed, told France's M6 television she swam out of her house through the bathroom in the middle of the night to join neighbors on their roof.
A man in Loire-Atlantique, who spent the night on the roof of his restaurant, said: "It was as if we were on an island."
Two people were killed near the northern Spanish city of Burgos when their car hit a fallen tree and a woman died when a wall fell on her in northwestern Spain, authorities said.
Unusually strong winds also uprooted trees in many parts of Portugal and heavy rain swelled rivers, prompting flood warnings in low-lying parts of Porto along the Douro River estuary.
A girl of 10 died when she was hit by a falling tree.
In Germany, authorities said a 69-year-old man was killed by a falling tree while hiking in the state of Hesse.
A 74-year-old man was killed and his wife critically injured in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg when a tree fell on their car, according to media reports.
Rail travel was severely disrupted in the three western states of Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland due to trees falling on overhead power lines.
PLANES, TRAINS DELAYED
Frankfurt airport was forced to cancel about 10 percent of its flights, an airport spokesman said.
Air France said it had canceled more than 100 flights on Sunday and more than half of all flights departing from Paris were significantly delayed, Aeroports de Paris said, while high-speed TGV train service was severely delayed due to branches and other debris obstructing the rail network.
By late Sunday, some 500,000 people in France were without electricity, said ErDF, the distribution arm of French energy group EDF, with Brittany and central France the hardest hit.
Much of England and Wales was on flood alert Sunday, with further prolonged heavy rain and strong winds expected after torrential downpours overnight.
(Additional reporting by Claude Canellas in Bordeaux, Guillaume Frouin in Nantes and Laure Bretton in Paris, Jason Webb in Madrid, Axel Bugge in Lisbon, Foo Yun Chee in Brussels, and Kylie MacLellan in London and Axel Hildebrand in Berlin, Editing by Noah Barkin)
Residents of La Rochelle are rescued from floods by a helicopter after severe storms swept western France 28 February 2010. REUTERS/French Fire Brigade/Sylvain Roussillon
bear/fox...
The Bear and the Fox...
A BEAR boasted very much of his philanthropy, saying, of all animals, he was the most tender in his regard for man, for he had such respect for him that he would not even touch his dead body.
A Fox, hearing these words, said with a smile to the Bear, "Oh! that you would eat the dead and not the living."
~Aesop
27 February 2010
advisory...
Tsunami advisory issued for all coastal areas of B.C. after 8.8 earthquake in Chile...
2 hours, 25 minutes ago
By The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER, B.C. - A tsunami advisory has been issued for all of coastal British Columbia following today's 8.8 earthquake in Chile.
The West Coast Alaska Tsunami Warning Center says a tsunami advisory means there is a possibility of strong localized currents.
No significant inundation is expected, but low-lying coastal areas and beaches are at risk.
The provincial emergency system says experts predict the first wave arrival time of 15:11 PST at the southern B.C. coastline.
It says local governments may consider activating their emergency plans, including evacuating marinas, beaches and other areas that are below normal high-tide mark.
A stronger tsunami warning was issued earlier today for a wide swath of the Pacific, including Hawaii, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
Copyright © 2010 Canadian Press
A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration image showing a model of the preliminary forecast of the tsunami triggered by the quake in Chile.
The model shows waves of up to one meter traveling across the Pacific Ocean.
A tsunami has crashed into Chile's coast in a potential portent of disaster across the Pacific ocean as nations go on alert for towering waves generated by a killer quake. Photo:/AFP
hoot...
Children read books, not reviews.
They don't give a hoot about critics.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Isaac Bashevis Singer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 21 November 1902 Leoncin, Congress Poland |
| Died | 24 July 1991 (aged 88) Surfside, Florida, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer |
| Language | Yiddish |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | Fictional prose |
| Notable award(s) | Nobel Prize in Literature 1978 |
Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: י21 November 1902 (see notes below) – 24 July 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish American author noted for his short stories.
He was one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement, and received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1978.
Contents |
Biography
Early life
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin village near Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire.
A few years later, the family moved to a nearby Polish town of Radzymin, which is often and erroneously given as his birthplace.
The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most probably it was 21 November 1902, a date Singer gave both to his official biographer, Paul Kresh,[1] and his secretary, Dvorah Telushkin.[2]
It is also consistent with the historical events he and his brother refer to in their childhood memoirs.
The often quoted birth date, 14 July 1904 was made up by the author in his youth, most probably to make himself younger to avoid the draft[3] .
His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj.
Singer later used her name in his pen name "Bashevis" (Bathsheba's).
His elder siblings--brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893-1944) and sister Esther Kreitman (1891–1954)--were also writers.
Esther was the first in the family to write stories.[4]
The family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva.
After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the family moved to Krochmalna Street in the Yiddish-speaking poor Jewish quarter of Warsaw, where Singer grew up.
There his father acted as a rabbi — i.e., judge, arbitrator, religious authority and spiritual leader.[5]
World War I
In 1917, because of the hardships of World War I, the family split up.
Singer moved with his mother and younger brother Moshe to his mother's hometown of Biłgoraj, a traditional Jewish town or shtetl, where his mother's brothers had followed his grandfather as rabbis.[5]
When his father became a village rabbi again in 1921, Singer went back to Warsaw, where he entered the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary, and soon decided neither the school nor the profession suited him.
He returned to Biłgoraj, where he tried to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons, but soon gave up and joined his parents, considering himself a failure.
In 1923 his older brother, Israel Joshua, arranged for him to move to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the Literarische Bleter, of which he was an editor.[6]
United States
In 1935, four years before the German invasion and the Holocaust, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States, due to the growing Nazi threat in neighboring Germany.[7]
The move separated the author from his common-law first wife, Runia Pontsch, and son, Israel Zamir {b.1929}, who instead went to Moscow and then Palestine (they would meet in 1955).
Singer settled in New York, where he took up work as a journalist and columnist for The Forward (פֿאָרװערטס), a Yiddish-language newspaper.
After a promising start, he became despondent and felt for some years "Lost in America" (title of a Singer novel, in Yiddish from 1974 onward, in English 1981).
In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann (born Haimann) {b.1907-d.1996}, a German-Jewish refugee from Munich whom he married in 1940.
After the marriage he returned to prolific writing and to contributing to the Forward, using, besides "Bashevis", the pen names "Varshavsky" and "D. Segal."[8]
Singer died on 24 July 1991 in Surfside, Florida, after suffering a series of strokes.
He was buried in Cedar Park Cemetery, Emerson.[9][10]
A street in Surfside, Florida is named Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard in his honor.
The full academic scholarship for undergraduate students at the University of Miami is named in his honor.
Writing
Singer's first published story won the literary competition of the "literarishe bletter" and garnered him a reputation as a promising talent.
A reflection of his formative years in "the kitchen of literature"[2] can be found in many of his later works.
I. B. Singer published his first novel, Satan in Goray, in installments in the literary magazine Globus, which he cofounded with his life-long friend, the Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin in 1935.
It tells the story of events in 1648 in the village of Goraj (close to Biłgoraj), where the Jews of Poland lost a third of their population in a cruel uprising by Cossacks, and details the effects of the seventeenth-century faraway false messiah, Shabbatai Zvi, on the local population.
Its last chapter imitates the style of medieval Yiddish chronicle.
With a stark depiction of innocence crushed by circumstance, the novel appears to foreshadow coming danger.
In his later work The Slave (1962), Singer returns to the aftermath of 1648, in a love story between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman, where he depicts the traumatized and desperate survivors of the historic catastrophe with even deeper understanding.
The Family Moskat
Singer became an actual literary contributor to the Forward only following his older brother's death in 1945, when he published The Family Moskat in his honor.
But his own style showed in the daring turns of his action and characters - with (and this in the Jewish family-newspaper in 1945) double adultery in the holiest of nights of Judaism, the evening of Yom Kippur.
He was almost forced to stop writing the novel by his legendary editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, but was saved by readers who wanted the story to go on.
After this, his stories - which he had published in Yiddish literary newspapers before - were printed in the Forward as well.
Throughout the 1940s, Singer's reputation grew.
After World War II and the near destruction of the Yiddish-speaking peoples, Yiddish seemed to be a dead language.
Though Singer had moved to the United States, he believed in the power of his native language and maintained there was still a large audience that longed to read in Yiddish.
In an interview in Encounter (Feb. 1979), he claimed although the Jews of Poland had died, "something - call it spirit or whatever - is still somewhere in the universe.
"This is a mystical kind of feeling, but I feel there is truth in it."
Some of his colleagues and readers were shocked by this all-encompassing view of human nature.
He wrote about female homosexuality ("Zeitl and Rickl" in "The Seance"), transvestitism ("Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" in "Short Friday"), and of rabbis corrupted by demons ("Zeidlus the Pope" in "Short Friday").
In those novels and stories which seem to recount his own life, he portrays himself unflatteringly (with some degree of accuracy) as an artist who is self-centered yet has a keen eye for the sufferings and tribulations of others.
Literary influences
Singer had many literary influences; besides the religious texts he studied there where the folktales he grew up with and worldly Yiddish detective-stories about "Max Spitzkopf" and his assistant "Fuchs"[3]; there was Dostoyevsky, whose Crime and Punishment he read when he was fourteen[11]; and he writes about the importance of the Yiddish translations donated in book-crates from America, which he studied as a teenager in Bilgoraj: "I read everything: Stories, novels, plays, essays… I read Rejsen, Strindberg, Don Kaplanowitsch, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Maupassant and Chekhov."[11]
He studied many philosophers, among them Spinoza[11]., Arthur Schopenhauer[4], and Otto Weininger[3].
Among his Yiddish contemporaries Singer himself considered his older brother to be his greatest artistic example; he was a life-long friend and admirer of the author and poet Aaron Zeitlin.
Of his non-Yiddish-contemporaries, he was strongly influenced by the writings of Knut Hamsun, many of whose works he later translated, while he had more critical attitude towards Thomas Mann, whose approach to writing he considered opposed to his own[12].
Contrary to Hamsun's approach, Singer shaped his world not only with the egos of his characters, but also using the moral commitments of the Jewish tradition he grew up with and his father embodies in the stories about his youth.
This led to the dichotomy between the life his heroes lead and the life they feel they should lead - which gives his art a modernity his predecessors do not evince.
His themes of witchcraft, mystery, and legend draw on traditional sources, but they are contrasted with a modern and ironic consciousness.
They are also concerned with the bizarre and the grotesque.
Another important strand of his art is intra-familial strife - which he experienced firsthand when taking refuge with his mother and younger brother at his uncles home in Biłgoraj.
This is the central theme in Singer's big family chronicles - like The Family Moskat (1950), The Manor (1967), and The Estate (1969). Some are reminded by them of Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks; Singer had translated Mann's Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) into Yiddish as a young writer.
Language
Singer always wrote and published in Yiddish – almost all of it in newspapers – and then edited his novels and stories for their American versions, which became the basis for all other translations; he referred to the English version as his "second original".
This has led to an ongoing controversy whereby the "real Singer" can be found in the Yiddish original, with its finely tuned language and sometimes rambling construction, or in the more tightly edited American version, where the language is usually simpler and more direct.
Many of Singer's stories and novels have not yet been translated.
In the short story form, in which many critics feel he made his most lasting contributions, his greatest influences were Chekhov and Maupassant.
From Maupassant, Singer developed a finely grained sense of drama.
Like the French master, Singer's stories can pack enormous visceral excitement in the space of a few pages.
From Chekhov, Singer developed his ability to draw characters of enormous complexity and dignity in the briefest of spaces.
In the forward to his personally selected volume of his finest short stories he describes the two aforementioned writers as the greatest masters of the short story form.
Illustrators
Several respected artists have illustrated Singer’s novels, short stories, and children’s books including Raphael Soyer, Maurice Sendak, Larry Rivers, and Irene Lieblich.
Singer personally selected Lieblich to illustrate some of his books for children, including A Tale of Three Wishes and The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah after seeing her work in an exhibition at an Artists Equity exhibit in New York.
A Holocaust survivor, Lieblich was from Zamosc, Poland, a town adjacent to the area where Singer grew up.
As their memories of shtetl life were so similar, Singer found Lieblich’s images ideally suited to illustrate his texts.
Of her style, Singer wrote, “Her works are rooted in Jewish folklore and are faithful to Jewish life and the Jewish spirit.”
Summary
Singer published at least 18 novels, 14 children's books, a number of memoirs, essays and articles, but is best known as a writer of short stories, which have appeared in over a dozen collections.
The first collection of Singer's short stories in English, Gimpel the Fool, was published in 1957.
The title story was translated by Saul Bellow and published in May 1953 in the Partisan Review.
Selections from Singer's "Varshavsky-stories" in the Daily Forward were later published in anthologies such as My Father's Court (1966).
Later collections include A Crown of Feathers (1973), with notable masterpieces in between, such as The Spinoza of Market Street (1961) and A Friend of Kafka (1970). His stories and novels reflect the world of the East European Jewry he grew up in.
After his many years in America, his stories concerned both the world of the immigrants and how their American dream proves elusive when they obtain it, e.g. Salomon Margolin, the successful doctor of "A Wedding in Brownsville" (in Short Friday) who finds out his true love was killed by the Nazis; and when it escapes them as it does in the "Cabalist of East Broadway" (in A Crown of Feathers), who prefers the misery of the Lower East Side to an honored and secure life as a married man.
Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, translations of dozens of his stories were frequently published in popular magazines such as Playboy and Esquire, which attempted to raise their literary reputation by publishing Singer, and he in turn found them to be appropriate outlets for his work.
Throughout the 1960s, Singer continued to write on questions of personal morality, and was the target of scathing criticism from many quarters, some of it for not being "moral" enough, some for writing stories that no one wanted to hear.
To his critics he replied, "Literature must spring from the past, from the love of the uniform force that wrote it, and not from the uncertainty of the future."
Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978[13].
One of his most famous novels, due to a popular movie adaptation, was Enemies, a Love Story, in which a Holocaust survivor deals with his own desires, complex family relationships, and a loss of faith.
Singer's feminist story "Yentl" has had a wide impact on culture since its conversion into popular movie starring Barbra Streisand.
Perhaps the most fascinating Singer-inspired film is 1974's Mr. Singer's Nightmare or Mrs. Pupkos Beard by Bruce Davidson, a renowned photographer who became Singer's neighbor.
This unique film is a half-hour mixture of documentary and fantasy for which Singer not only wrote the script but played the leading role.
Beliefs
Judaism
Singer's relationship to Judaism, which was complex and unconventional, evades description because he did not write very much directly about it.
On the other hand, he often employs first-person narrators in his fiction clearly meant to represent him personally.
He regarded himself as a skeptic and a loner, though he felt a connection to his orthodox roots.
Ultimately, he developed a view of religion and philosophy, which he called "private mysticism: Since God was completely unknown, and eternally silent, He could be endowed with whatever traits one elected to hang upon Him."[14][15]
Singer was raised Orthodox, and learned all the Jewish prayers, studied Hebrew, and learned Torah and Talmud.
As he recounted in the autobiographical "In My Father's Court", he broke away from his parents in his early twenties and, influenced by his older brother, who had done the same, began spending time with non-religious Bohemian artists in Warsaw.
Although he clearly believed in a monotheistic God, as in traditional Judaism, he stopped attending Jewish religious services of any kind, even on the High Holy Days.
He struggled throughout his life with the realization a kind and compassionate God would never inflict the massive suffering he saw around him, especially the Holocaust deaths of the Polish Jews he grew up with.
In one interview with the photographer Richard Kaplan, he said, "I am angry at God because of what happened to my brother": Singer's older brother died suddenly in February 1944, in New York, of a thrombosis, his younger brother perished in Soviet Russia around 1945, after being deported with his mother and wife to Southern Kazakhstan.
But his anger did not appear to become atheism.
In one story his narrator tells a woman, "If you believe in God, then he exists."
Despite all the complexities of his religious outlook, Singer lived in the midst of the Jewish community throughout his life.
He did not seem to be comfortable unless he was surrounded by Jews; particularly Jews born in Europe.
Although he spoke English, Hebrew, and Polish quite fluently, he always considered Yiddish his natural tongue, he always wrote in Yiddish and he was the last famous American author writing in this language.
After he had achieved success as a writer in New York, Singer and his wife began spending time during the winters with the Jewish community in Miami.
Eventually, as senior citizens, they moved to Miami and identified closely with the European Jewish community: a street was named after him long before he died.
Singer was buried in a traditional Jewish ceremony in a Jewish cemetery.
Especially in his short fiction, he often wrote about various Jews having religious struggles; sometimes these struggles became violent, bringing death or mental illness.
In one story he meets a young woman in New York whom he knew from an Orthodox family in Poland.
She has become a kind of hippie, sings American folk music with a guitar, and rejects Judaism, although the narrator comments that in many ways she seems typically Jewish.
The narrator says he often meets Jews who think they are anything but Jewish, and yet still are.
In the end, Singer remains an unquestionably Jewish writer, yet his precise views about Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish God are open to interpretation.
Whatever they were, they lay at the center of his literary art.
Vegetarianism
Singer was a prominent vegetarian[16] for the last 35 years of his life and often included vegetarian themes in his works.
In his short story, The Slaughterer, he described the anguish of an appointed slaughterer trying to reconcile his compassion for animals with his job of killing them.
He felt the ingestion of meat was a denial of all ideals and all religions: "How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood?"
When asked if he had become a vegetarian for health reasons, he replied: "I did it for the health of the chickens."
In The Letter Writer, he wrote "In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."[17]
In the preface to Steven Rosen's "Food for Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions" (1986), Singer wrote, "When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.
"Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others.
"Why should man then expect mercy from God?
"It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.
"It is inconsistent.
"I can never accept inconsistency or injustice.
'Even if it comes from God.
"If there would come a voice from God saying, "I'm against vegetarianism!" I would say, "Well, I am for it!"
"This is how strongly I feel in this regard."
Bibliography
Note: Publication dates here refer to English translations, not the Yiddish originals, which often predate their translations by ten or twenty years.
- Short stories
- "The Mistake" The New Yorker 60/51 (4 February 1985) : 36-40. Translated from the Yiddish by Rina Borrow and Lester Goran.
- Posthumous editions
- Stavans, Ilan, ed. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stories Vol. 1 (Library of America, 2004) ISBN 978-1-93108261-7
- Stavans, Ilan, ed. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stories Vol. 2 (Library of America, 2004) ISBN 978-1-93108262-4
- Stavans, Ilan, ed. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stories Vol. 3 (Library of America, 2004) ISBN 978-1-93108263-1
- Burgin, Richard, and Isaac Bashevis Singer Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (1985) ISBN 0-385-17999-5
- Rencontre au Sommet (86-page transcript in book form of conversations between Singer and Anthony Burgess) (1998)
See also
- List of short story authors
- Shlemiel the First - musical play based on Singer's Chelm stories
References
Notes
- ^ Paul Kresh "Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Magician of West 86th Street, A Biography", The Dial Press, New York 1979, p. 390.
- ^ a b Dvorah Telushkin "Master of Dreams", A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer", p. 266, New York, 1997.
- ^ a b c Stephen Tree "Isaac Bashevis Singer", Munich, p. 18-19, 2004.
- ^ a b Maurice Carr, "My Uncle Itzhak: A Memoir of I. B. Singer", In: Commentary, December 1992.
- ^ a b Isaac Bashevis Singer, In my Father's Court New York, 1963.
- ^ Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Little Boy in Search of God New York: Doubleday, 1976.
- ^ Kristina Maul, "Communication and Society in Jewish American Short Stories", GRIN Verlag, 2007, pg. 88, [1]
- ^ See: Both bibliographies (given on this page).
- ^ "Sometimes the Grave Is a Fine and Public Place". New York Times. March 28, 2004. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFD71230F93BA15750C0A9629C8B63. Retrieved 2007-08-21. "Cedar Park Cemetery in Paramus [sic] tends toward performers. Martin Balsam, who won both a Tony and an Oscar was buried there in 1996. Joe E. Lewis, the comic whose rough life was portrayed by Frank Sinatra in the 1957 movie, The Joker Is Wild, is nearby. (As are two illustrious nonperformers, the Nobel Prize writer Isaac Bashevis Singer and the poet Delmore Schwartz.)".
- ^ "Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Laureate for His Yiddish Stories, Is Dead at 87.". New York Times. July 26, 1991. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D91231F935A15754C0A967958260&scp=5&sq=Isaac+Bashevis+Singer&st=nyt. Retrieved 2008-04-30. "Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose vivid evocations of Jewish life in his native Poland and of his experiences as an immigrant in America won him the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday. He was 87 years old and lived in Surfside, Florida".
- ^ a b c Isaac Bashevis singer, The New Winds (short story), in In my Father's Court, NY 1963, and elsewhere.
- ^ Stephen Tree "Isaac Bashevis Singer", Munich, p. 88, 2004.
- ^ Text of Nobel Lecture.
- ^ Grace Farrell, Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, p. 236, University Press of Mississippi, 1992.
- ^ Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and exile, Doubleday, p. 99, 1984.
- ^ History of Vegetarianism - Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991).
- ^ Singer, Isaac Bashevis. The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Cape. p. 271.
Bibliography
- Paul Kresh "Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street", New York 1979
- Dorothea Straus, "Under the Canopy. The story of a friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer that chronicles a reawakening of Jewish identity.", George Braziller: New York, 1982. ISBN 0-8076-1028-3.
- Maurice Carr, "My Uncle Itzhak: A Memoir of I. B. Singer", In: Commentary, December 1992
- Aleksandra Ziółkowska "Korzenie są polskie", Warszawa 1992, ISBN 83-7066-406-7;
- Aleksandra Ziółkowska Boehm "The Roots Are Polish", Toronto 2004, ISBN 0-920517-05-6.
- Israel Zamir "Journey to My Father Isaac Bashevis Singer", New York 1995
- Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater, Davi Napoleon. Includes detailed discussion and anecodtes concerning Robert Kalfin's production of Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy at the Chelsea Theater Center and on Broadway, including conflicts with Barbra Streisand and Tovah Feldshuh. Iowa State University Press. ISBN-0-8138-1713-7, 1991
- Lester Goran "The Bright Streets of Surfside. The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer", Kent, Ohio 1994
- Janet Hadda "Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life", New York 1997
- Dvorah Telushkin "Master of Dreams", A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer", New York 1997
- Agata Tuszynska "Lost Landscapes", In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland, Transl. by M. G. Levine, New York 1998
- "The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer", edited by Seth Wolitz, University of Texas Press, 2002
- Stephen Tree "Isaac Bashevis Singer", Munich 2004 (in German) ISBN 3423244151
- Jeffrey Sussman: "Recollecting Isaac Bashevis Singer." Jewish Currents Magazine and The East Hampton Star
External links
 | Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Isaac Bashevis Singer |
- Isaac Bashevis Singer at FSG
- 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature
- Nobel biography
- http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/singer_i.html
- Singer page at Library of Congress
- The Paris Review Interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
- Singer's Artists
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Categories: 1902 births | 1991 deaths | People from Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki County | American short story writers | American vegetarians | American autobiographers | Polish-American Jews | American memoirists | Deaths from stroke | Jewish American writers | American Jews | Jewish novelists | Writers from New York | Magic realism writers | People who emigrated to escape Nazism | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Nobel laureates in Literature | American Nobel laureates | Polish Jews | Polish Nobel laureates | Polish vegetarians | Animal rights movement | Polish Americans | American children's writers | Polish children's writers | Yiddish-language writers
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