Published: 27 July 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The Nobel Prize winner died 30 years ago last week, and through a winding tale of luck, timing, and money, his papers ended up at the University of Texas
THE LITERARY ARCHIVE of Isaac Bashevis Singer ended up at the University of Texas, and thereby hangs a tale of elective affinity, luck, timing, and money—which by the way is how the great Texas oil fortunes always got made.
Singer, the enigmatic master storyteller, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature, was as metropolitan a man as the world has ever known—Warsaw, Manhattan West Side, Miami—and so it is a bit of a puzzle even today to many people that his papers came to rest in the “province.”
You want to do research on Singer? You have to come to the Humanities Research Centre of the University of Texas in Austin.
The story begins not with Singer but with me, a gentile who grew up in the South and became fascinated with Yiddish. How? I was studying mathematics at Georgia Tech when I won an exchange fellowship to the University of Stuttgart for my senior year, 1957-1958. There, I learned German fluently, discovered that I wasn’t cut out to be a very good mathematician, and became interested in studying the Holocaust before it became known as that.
In 1958, there was a series of belated trials of war criminals in Germany, and I became acquainted with one who gave witness—Fritz Bloch, the charismatic chief rabbi of Württemberg, who had seen firsthand the atrocities in Lithuania and then escaped to Palestine just in time to save his life. After the war he moved back to Germany without his family—his wife and children wouldn’t return—in order to look after what of his flock remained or had returned.
Though I had read most of his novels, Isaac Bashevis Singer was then only a name to me. I had grown up in small-town Mississippi where most of my best friends were Jewish, so I had a disposition toward philo-semitism.
My readings on the Holocaust while in Germany had gotten me interested in its principal language, Yiddish, and as soon as I returned to the States, I set out to learn Yiddish. Knowing German helped, but only up to a point.
