Lester Goran - The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer

I N THE TEN years I knew Isaac Bashevis Singer, between April 1978 and about the time he left the University of Miami in 1988, I discovered in him a tendency to exercise his literary skills to remarkable daily effect. He did not merely use his abilities when he formally created his fictions, either alone or when we worked together on his translations. He rewrote all dayand, he assured me, while he dreamed at nighteverything around him, people, events, geography, and moral assumptions. Complete in himself, confident of what he understood of narrative, he would correct and revise for people who told him what they thought was a good story. He would pick and choose for me a living persons traits that he wished to embellish as if all that mattered was that he had the final say on whatever, however remotely, touched him.

Surfside, Florida, a community on the northern outskirts of Miami Beach, where he had purchased a condominium several years before I met him, was as familiar to him as the Polish shtetls in his imagination. Nothing in the cleaners shops, restaurants, and bakeries on Harding surprised him. Surfside changed the name of the street leading up to his apartment at 9511 Collins Avenue. It was renamed Isaac Singer Boulevard. He appropriated the waitresses in Shelton Drugs and next door at Dannys Restaurant, and what he did not know by fact he closed off by recourse to his considerable imagination.

We worked together teaching a spring class at the university on Mondays and on Sundays translating his stories from the Yiddish at a small table in the poorly ventilated game room on the first floor of his condominium building.

Proust used to come home from dinners and late at night compose a letter to his host, outlining the events of the evening, the deficiencies and moments of the experience, and then send the letter immediately by coach post so that his recent host would not linger long in doubt about Prousts reaction to the events of the night. The hosts were frequently astonished, perhaps appalled. No one could dispute Prousts facts; they were accurate. It was what he chose to see, what he chose to make of what hed heard or felt and could commit with his rare eloquence and insight to paper. He reportedly died in bed correcting galleyslittle difference, I suggest, from living between the mechanics of writing and the shadowy drama others thought of as real life. I think there is a Marcel Proust in most novelists of sustained commitment, the score-keeping and registration of necessary details, for proportion and comfort, if not Prousts uncanny social and ironical sense of the devilishness in the cruel effect of time on hapless humans.

A searcher after proportion myself, with six published novels when I met Singer, I watched him as closely as Ive ever observed anyone except my mother and father. I did not do it consciously, that is to say, in the desire to write a book about Isaac Singer and me. He was peculiar, vulnerable, complex, and active; and I could not keep my writers eyes away from him.

If I studied him with a sense that he was a man making ripples in the great ponds of history, whether of literature, Jewishness, or some statement toward psychological truth, I was not aware of this element to my scrutiny. He was Isaac Singer to me, personal, tough, a writer: perhaps one gifted beyond any I would know this close but still, here and now, Isaacwith all his vain posturings and majestic abilities. In Hebrew we were both named Yitzchak Silberman, I too on my mothers side. We came from ancestral roots next door to each other in Poland, and it was certainly coincidental that we wound up teaching English 560 together in room 323 of the Ashe Building at the University of Miami, two writers and neighbors with Bilgoray and Bialystok binding and separating us.