Agata Tuszynska "Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland."
The 1991 death of Singer motivated Tuszynska, a Polish historian, to learn about the Yiddish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. After all, his works were her "first guide within the world of Polish Jewry." But this is no standard biography. In impressionistic, almost ethereal fashion, Tuszynska intersperses her reflections on the tragedy that befell on Polish Jewry - before WWII by far the largest Jewish community in the world. Both during and after the Holocaust with excerpts of interviews with ordinary Poles and Jewish intellectuals. Singer, who emigrated to New York in the 1930s, emerges as a symbol of Polish Jewry.
Inspired by the novels and short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tuszynska, a contemporary Polish writer, reaches back in time to uncover and reconstruct a once-vibrant ethnic community. Obsessed by the few remaining symbols and vestiges of pre^-World War II Jewry left in Poland, she unstintingly travels to small Polish towns and to cities in both the U.S. and Israel in search of witnesses and survivors of the Polish Holocaust. Employing Singer's life and work as both a starting point and a backdrop, Tuszynska weaves these interviews and reminiscences into a lyrical remembrance of a bygone time and place.
Publisher: ‎ William Morrow & Co. First Edition, 1998.
New book. Small reminder mark on bottom of bookblock. See pictures.