Fuxmann

Hello Fuxman

I am the writer of the original Esther Kreitman article. I see that you added some information gleaned from an I.B. Singer biography. The problem is that there are a number of I.B. Singer bios that keep repeating the same information from each other, but they aren't right. As an example, they claim that Kreitman's mother threw her stories out the train window on the way to Kreitman's arranged marriage. This is not the way Kreitman herself told this story. In a very brief essay in a British Yiddish-language newspaper, she says that she wrote stories but didn't ever think of publishing them and left them behind when she left Poland. There is also no hard evidence or her being diagnosed with anything, although epilepsy has some claim as her son later claimed she had been hospitalized for it. (He was not always a completely reliable source, however). Another problem is the tendency to use "Deborah" as fact, when it is fiction. It is autobiographical fiction, but it is still fiction. So we can only use it to infer something that might have occured, not to state that something happened to her because we find it in the novel.

I will wait a few days to see if you want to make some changes yourself--word things more carefully as supposition, for example--but if not I will change your additions to reflect the extensive research I've done on this writer. My 25-page article on her will come out in volume 333 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography next year. I will add it to the bibliography when it's available. I would email you the draft if you are interested.

Best, Nomi Jones

Dear Nomi Jones,

thanks for your interesting points. Having dealt intensly with I. B. Singer myself I'll be happy to get your article.

- The story about the torn-up stories was told by her son and does not contradict her own account of having left them in Poland - given in a time when she had learned about her mother's tragic fate and did not want to sully her remembrance.

- As you correctly say, "Deborah" is fiction - but it fits so closely with both her brothers reminiscences about their youth (and I. B. Singer's "Yentl") that a strong autobiographical element is evident.

- As to her symptoms, it is difficult even for specialists to differentiate between the psychological and physical side of epilepsia or epilepsia-like symptoms. Even if the nature of her problems must remain open to speculation, their existence is clearly documented.

Best regards Fuxmann

Dear 64.131.240.40,

congratulations to your fine and erudite emendations.

As I consider it important not to reduce the complex relationship between three (or actually four) so gifted siblings to the simple equation "brothers bad / sister good" I made some changes in the interest of a more neutral and balanced picture, which in no way diminishes the stature of the article's heroine.

Best regards

Fuxmann

Hi Fuxmann

It was I, Nomi Jones again. For some reason, Wikipedia sometimes logs me out without me noticing, so my contributions end up as 64.131.240.40

I've done a little more work on Kreitman since we last corresponded, so I wanted to make the article as good as possible. I left the places where I thought you were on, but: - the brothers were really not good to Kreitman. That she was difficult, possibly mentally unstable, is also true. But they were really dispicable about her writing. I have now hand-searched the Forverts for a number of months looking for the book notice that she requested be put in, without finding it. I also have been going back over some of her correspondance in the YIVO archives. There is no way for I.B. or I.J. to come out of this anything but horrible. They left her in dire poverty in England and refused to help her career. I'm sorry, it's really true. I don't say she's good, because she wasn't. Just that they didn't do what you would expect them to do for her. Personally, none of the Singers seems like someone I'd like to have dinner with. - I think you are inserting too much about the third brother, Moyshe. He is not mentioned in either the entry for I.B. or the entry for I.J. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for him to be given more than a sentence in this entry. Perhaps you want to write another entry about forced evacuations to central Asia, which are quite interesting. A number of Soviet Yiddish writers described them. - when a writer writes fiction, we should believe them that they are making stuff up. If we treat it as autobiography, we are on a slippery slope. We know that she changed certain things from reality. Her real-life mother was not an invalid. She had three brothers and two sisters (they died in infancy), but in Sheydim-Tants (Deborah) the main character had only one brother. So how are we to know for unverifiable details which are ones she made up, heightened, took from another person's real life, altered in time or place? Also, the English and Yiddish versions of the novel are different in several interesting places. She obviously approved the English text, as she was alive and it was translated by her son. Which version are we to believe? "Strongly autobiographical" it is, I agree. That is a far cry from "autobiography." (Just as an aside, I'd be interested to know what language you read Sheydim-Tants in.)

Sadly, my article on Kreitman was cut from the Dictionary of Literary Biography. I'm now re-writing it to be appropriate for a journal, because there were weeks of eye-strain and deciphering handwriting in the archives that went into it, and there is significant new information in it. If you send me your email address I will send you the article, but when it appears in print it will be looking quite different.

Nomi Jones 02:07, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

p.s. sorry, I forgot to mention, the phrase "mental problem" sounds very harsh in English, like a school-yard taunt. We normally say "mental illness" or "mental condition" in formal writing. Nomi Jones 02:14, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Isaac Bashevis Singer copyrights violations

Hi. Thanks for fixing the copyrights violations, much appreciated! בברכה, El_C 06:09, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Sources

Please have a look at Talk:Theodor_Herzl#Atheist. Debresser (talk) 01:17, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

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