TWO POLISH BOOKS ABOUT ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Quite amazingly, there is no biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Much lesser of his contemporaries on the American and particularly New York scene may have more than one book of their lives, while Singer, a Nobel laureate, a quintessential exile from the Eastern European diaspora, and the most widely read Yiddish writer, has found no one to go after this fascinating subject. Why? What is it about Singer's life that so far has inhibited his potential biographers? Readers of Agata Tuszyiiska's Pejzaze pamieci might say the answer is in her book. Some would add: its best part. Now, in Poland the modern biography hardly exists. Taboos and inhibitions, developed through centuries of a specifically Polish culture of tolerance and justified (by fear of persecutions) respect for privacy, prevent us from "dragging into print" details of the personal lives of its celebrities. The creative achievement, Poles maintain, should speak for itself, and needs no further explanation from what we call the kitchen of the artist's life. And as long as their relatives, friends and enemies are around, no self-respecting scholar or critic (with little else but self-respect) would venture to produce a Western-style thoroughly researched biography of, say, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz or Jerzy Andrzejewski, Krzysztof Kamil BaczyAski, Tadeusz Borowski, Barbara Sadowska .... We do not even have biographies of Tuwim, Nalkowska, Lechoft ... or Zeromski! And yet, in this virtual biographical desert, there appears Agata Tuszyiiska's tale about Singer ? by no means a scholarly study of the writer's life, but still a quite detailed presentation, based on mostly solid sources, of his family background, his relations with parents and siblings, lovers, wife and his one, estranged, son. Well, why Singer? The author's answer, written in a breezy style which characterizes the entire book, is provided in the opening paragraph of the introduction: "Isaac Bashevis Singer was my first guide into the world of Polish Jews. Before I could