The Forgotten Singer: The Exiled Sister of I.J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer

The late Carr (The House of Napolitano, as Martin Lea ) paints a moving yet incomplete portrait of his mother, Esther Singer Kreitman (1891–1954), the little-known novelist sister of Yiddish writers I.J. Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carr describes growing up in London during WWI under the threat of German bombs, and listening to his mother’s stories about her gloomy Warsaw childhood: she was neglected by her mother, who left Kreitman in the care of a wet nurse who stored baby and crib beneath a table. Despite chronic sight problems, Kreitman devoured Yiddish fiction and wrote short stories from a young age. She later had an unhappy marriage with Carr’s “gallivanting” father, but persevered to publish three novels in Yiddish, which Carr eventually translated into English. Kreitman’s relationship with her brothers was frequently strained, writes the author, and while Isaac eventually dedicated a book to her, her name was misspelled in the dedication. There are some worthy insights into Kreitman’s psyche (“With the elusive [Isaac] my habitually overeffusive mother is at a loss for words”), but Carr’s tendency to weave in less intriguing recollections from his own life make for a scattershot narrative that does little to restore Kreitman to her place in 20th-century Yiddish literature. The definitive account of Kreitman’s life remains to be written. (July)