In My Father's Court

This was my first Singer work, and it floored me. WOW! His memoir describing his family's life in Warsaw before WWI is such a beautiful blend of humor and tragedy that I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. Absolutely stunning book. ( )

Mayn Tatn Bes-din-shtub

Extraordinari ( )

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1904-1991.

It is a bit sad to read a book such as this and realize, as you are nearing the end, that while you have been reading, the people remembered and memorialized in its pages will soon disappear once more into the void wherein they lay before you picked up the book. While you read, they have life once again, and the candles burn once again in the windows of No. 10 Krochnala Street.

At first, it was awkward as you met these people with their strange customs, but after entering their home time and time again, you became familiar with them and how they considered and reacted to each new situation. The old man, remembering himself as a boy, so skillful at describing the world as it was perceived by that boy, is now gone. And the generation he described, his father and his circle, is gone too - dead of old age, neglect, or Nazi depredations undreamed of in those days preceeding and during the First World War. Still, the shadow of the future is present, and Singer is cognizant of this when he writes "May these memoirs serve as a monument to him [Reb Asher] and his like, who lived in sanctity and died as martyrs."

Anecdotal, yet compelling. The work of a skillful storyteller, so many things told in old age, but through a child's eyes. 1/98