A Nobel Prize in Miami Beach: Isaac Bashevis Singer

In miami-beachjust a few blocks from Little Buenos Airesis the neighborhood of surf side. He lived there for almost 15 years.the award laureate of literature Isaac Bashevis Singer. It was him miami-beach 70’s, quaint, quiet, Yiddish playing everywhere.

It was there, in 1978, that he received the news of the Nobel Prize for describing “a world that is very Jewish but also very human.” He was in Sheldon’s, a drugstore that closed just a few years ago, having eggs and bagels for breakfast with Alma, his wife, when the messenger showed up. Singer ate there almost every morning. Legend has it that when he got the news he stammered “Oh, ok!” and he went back to his plate.

The writer first visited Miami Beach in 1948 with Alma and fell in love with the place. Back then, Yiddish conversation echoed in cafes and streets. “Here the sound of the Old World was as alive as ever.”

They stopped visiting in the 1960s, until in 1973 he was invited to give a lecture at the temple israel, in the downtown of the city. A former neighbor of Alma’s in Munich, who attended the conference, invited them to her apartment in the collins avenue. Once again they fell in love with Miami Beach and the former neighbor suggested that they buy an apartment in her building.

In 1977, after much thought, the Singers moved to the Surfside neighborhood. To the Surfside Towers specifically. There the author of The Wizard of Lublin he had the most prolific period of his long career.

Isaac Bashevis Singer born in Poland in 1903, then part of the Russian empire. From a family of rabbis, he studied religious studies before dropping out to become a reporter. His first novel Satan in Gorayappeared in 1933. In 1935 he emigrated to the United Stateswhere he continued his career as a journalist. He wrote in Yiddish and translated into English.

“Actually, it was a transcript copy refinement rather than a literary exercise. He read to the ‘translator’ in English, putting his Yiddish into a form the other could understand, and then the translator put the words into a grammatical or, at best, more idiomatic usage,” he said. lester goranwho was his collaborator in the final part of the Surfside years.

Singer was not a colorful writer. He preferred a plain, colloquial language, even jargon and full of humor, despite dealing with great tragedies in his work. He said of Yiddish in the acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize which is “the wise and humble language of us all, the language of frightened and hopeful humanity.” She had traveled to Stockholm accompanied by cheers and close friends. “It was an ecstatic moment for me when the King of Sweden presented me with the award,” he recalled.

He died at the age of 87, on June 24, 1991, in Surfside, after suffering a series of strokes. His home was designated a Literary Landmark by the Florida Center for the Book. three years later. A street in his Miami Beach neighborhood is called Isaac Singer Boulevard in his honor; and so is a square in Lublin, Poland, and a street in Tel-Aviv, Israel. The academic scholarship for students in the University of Miami It also bears his name.

KEEP READING: