Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction series tonight, Tuesday, March 24: THE MUSES OF ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser’s profile of the Nobel Prize winner debuted at Haifa last year. It has gone on to screen at Miami, and at Jewish fests in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Toronto, among others.
Singer, best known by mainstream audiences as the author of YENTL and ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY through the film adaptations, was long celebrated among Jewish American audiences since he began publishing his Yiddish stories in the 1930s. As signaled by the film’s title, Galay and Betser cleverly approach the writer from the perspectives of the various translators with whom he worked, always women, and, most surprisingly given their role, typically unable to read or speak Yiddish. This “harem,” as Singer referred to them, offer candid insight into his personal and professional life, and, most intriguingly, on the prickly social, cultural, and political questions that accompany the role of translation in literature. While targeting existing fans of his work, this sprightly biography still succeeds in introducing the man and his work to the unconverted in an unusual and engaging manner.
what (not) to doc 