The NY Times called Isaac Bashevis Singer a Polish writer. Wikipedia warriors made him Jewish again. jewishledger.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jewishledger.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Yaakov Schwartz is The Times of Israel s deputy Jewish World editor.
Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his Miami Beach apartment, October 10, 1978. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
In 2014, author and literary scholar David Stormberg took his first trip to the archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in search of material by the late Yiddish-language Jewish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. He hit the motherlode.
“I was looking for Bashevis Singer’s essays because I was interested in his non-fiction and worldview writing on literature, on Judaism and Yiddish, and also his personal philosophy,” Stromberg told The Times of Israel in a recent telephone interview from his home in Jerusalem. “What I didn’t expect to find, but what I did find, is that he’d already translated enough material for an entire book.”
The fight over Singer's identity offers lessons on the pitfalls of decentralized knowledge in the era of disinformation, with some possible insights about Polish ultranationalism.