Overview
Through a series of poignant and striking vignettes, Master of Dreams describes how Telushkin became Singer's assistant, then his editor, and after five years, his translator. And finally, she became the one person to whom Singer taught his craft as a writer. Throughout her tenure with Singer, Telushkin kept detailed diaries chronicling both their literary efforts and the evolution of their personal relationship. With this affectionate assessment of the later years of Singer's life, Telushkin reveals the brilliant but troubled Nobel laureate in all his complexity. Included here are many of the great moments in Singer's life - his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, his fiery encounter with then-Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and his surprising meeting with Barbra Streisand, who adapted and starred in the movie version of Singer's short story "Yentl." But Master of Dreams reveals the private Singer as well, the "merry pessimist" haunted by despair and torn between the old-world ethics of his Hasidic forebears in Europe and the moral abandon of modern secular man.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
During the last 14 years of Nobel laureate Singer's life (1904-91), Telushkin was his secretary, often his traveling companion on his lectures and readings and an informal editor and translator of his Yiddish. Although, as she shows, he owed much to her ability to keep him going as he declined physically and mentally, he suffered nevertheless from the unrelenting disabilities of aging in becomingoften despite increasing wealth and recognitionunreliable, unpredictable and miserly. Telushkin endured those traits and loyally remained. Her memoir evokes Singer and the texture of his life in Manhattan and Miami as he drifts, often unawares, into enfeebled old age. She records him as a warm limner of the shtetl and the immigrant experience, and as a cranky but compulsive writer who never gave his translators adequate credit or sufficient compensation. Once asked at a lecture why he wrote in a "dying language," he quipped, "I love to write about spirits and ghosts and nothing is better for a ghost than a dying language." A sad and sometimes moving look at a master writer, Telushkin's portrait will be a source for future biographers. Photos. (Oct.) FYI: Oxford published another biography titled Isaac Bashevis Singer, by Janet Hadda, this spring (Forecasts, Mar. 10).Kirkus Reviews
For most of the last 14 years of his life, I.B. Singer was assisted by Telushkin, a bright young woman who, in this charming and often poignant memoir, recalls their relationship with striking candor.When Telushkin offered to drive the Nobel laureate to Bard College for the seminar he was teaching—in exchange for being allowed to audit the course—she never expected that he would agree, or that it would lead to a lengthy and turbulent professional and personal relationship with the last of the great Yiddish writers. The man she encountered was a natural charmer, an inveterate flatterer whose childlike demeanor could include the tantrums and dark moods of a spoiled child. Over the course of their time together, she went from being an unpaid chauffeur to serving as his secretary, amanuensis, and eventually a translator of some 20 of his short stories; she also became a close friend, frequent confidant, and surrogate daughter. Telushkin eventually found a second career for herself as a storyteller, and Master of Dreams is a storyteller's book; although it has a loosely chronological structure, it is really a series of thematically linked anecdotes, illuminating a complex, often disturbing character. In the course of his nearly 90 years of life, Singer abandoned or wounded nearly everyone he had been close to, from the son he ignored to his wife of 51 years. Telushkin is no exception, and much of the book's power comes from the excruciating deterioration of their friendship as the psychic demons that drove the writer combined with the no less potent hobgoblins of age and physical breakdown.
But the portrait that emerges is by and large a loving one, often lovely to read, honest to a fault, and the man portrayed comes across as an admirable figure, albeit one with huge flaws.