The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer - Hardcover

Goran, Lester

9780873385060: The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0873385063 ISBN 13: 9780873385060

Publisher: The Kent State University Press, 1994

The Bright Streets of Surfside chronicles 10 years in the life of Isaac Bashevis Singer, as witnessed and shared by a fellow writer close to him at the time. In 1978, with a mixture of hero worship and academic responsibility as director of creative writing at the University of Miami, Lester Goran brought Singer to teach at the Coral Gables campus. The eminent Polish-American author was then 74 years old and five months away from receiving the Nobel Prize. Goran became Singer’s closest friend and translator as they taught advanced courses in creative writing together until Singer retired in 1988. With a sometimes painful authenticity, Goran recounts the course of their extraordinary friendship. It was a fascinating time, writes Goran, recalling his frustration at Singer’s intractable desire not to teach (he mistrusted the faculty and was bewildered by the students) and his pleasure in Singer’s company.

Touching and humorous, the memoir offers a rare opportunity to learn about this influential Yiddish writer who often concealed his real beliefs, feelings, and personal history from the public. Goran tells the tale with an honesty that is unsparing of his own dilemmas while it is deeply sympathetic to a great writer at odds with himself and his time. Looking frankly at a crucial time in his own life as a writer, Goran derives some understanding of the moral dimensions of Singer’s art as he was menaced by the burdens of loss, age, and fame. Goran discusses Singer’s philosophies about his life and art, his works in progress, and his lifelong devotion to literature. In addition, he offers his own reflections on working with the last grand Yiddish novelist and on his role in keeping Yiddish alive.

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About the Author:

Lester Goran is a professor of English at the University of Miami. His other publications include Tales from the Irish Club: A Collection of Short Stories (Kent State University Press, 1995), She Loved Me Once and Other Stories (Kent State University Press, 1997), Outlaws of the Purple Cow and Other Stories (Kent State University Press, 1999), and nine novels, including Mrs. Beautiful, The Demon in the Sun Parlor, and The Keeper of Secrets.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Sometimes a memoir writer makes the unfortunate decision to turn a potentially good 20-page article into a work many times that length. Goran's book is Exhibit A. Goran, a novelist (Mrs. Beautiful, not reviewed, etc.) and English professor at the University of Miami, co-led a weekly creative writing course there with Isaac Bashevis Singer for a decade (197888) while also helping translate and edit some of Singer's stories. His portrait of their friendship consists largely of seemingly verbatim transcripts of conversations; how they were remembered or recorded is never explained. Occasionally puckish or otherwise witty, these exchanges far too often consist of forgettable banter. Goran works diligently to capture an intense, decade-long friendship, and offers an occasional piquant observation (e.g., a reference to Singer's ``giddy savage world''). But for a teacher of writing, he also delivers himself of some peculiar, portentous prose (e.g., ``He remains for me the spokesman of our dilemma of unbelonging'') and cites some dubious second- and third-hand reports of ``acts'' and ``quotes'' (he quotes Singer as having remarked that Elie Wiesel, a fellow Jewish-European-American Nobel laureate, allegedly complained to a friend in Paris that ``Isaac Singer is the worst enemy of the Jews after Hitler''; Goran apparently made no effort to verify these words). At times, he does step back from their conversations to portray more vividly the very sad, even pitiable, man Singer had become at the end of his life: often lonely, misanthropic, melancholy, self-centered, and emotionally withholding. In his last few years (the octogenarian Singer died in 1991) his tendency towards absentmindedness and fearfulness became considerably more pronounced. But this memoir is sad too for what it reveals about the author, who seems largely unable to winnow out much of substance from a great deal of oral fluff. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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