Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life

Yiddish scholar and psychoanalyst Janet Hadda takes a bracingly unreverential look at the Nobel laureate too often viewed simplistically as a folksy chronicler of Jewish shtetl culture. Hadda's depiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) as a sophisticated, self-conscious artist won't surprise admirers of The Family Moskat, Yentl, and his other works of fiction. They will undoubtedly be dismayed, however, by her contention--with reasonable supporting evidence--that he was a cold, distant sibling, a cruel husband, and a capricious, manipulative womanizer. Hadda's warts-and-all portrait seems fair, though not overly generous.