The Forgotten Singer: The Exiled Sister of I.J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer: Reading Resources

The Forgotten Singer: The Exiled Sister of I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer is made up of 46 evocative snapshots that portray what life was like for Esther Singer Kreitman, an important writer living in the shadow of her famous brothers. It’s also a meditation on the mother-son relationship, a failed marriage, and life as a Jew in the interwar period. Carr’s writing is urgent, irreverent, timely, and unaffected, proving it’s never too late to celebrate an unsung hero of the written word.

Four Questions

To get you started before you crack open the collection, here are four questions to keep in mind while you read.

1. Carr implicitly casts himself as a writer in a family of famous writers. Do you think the book lives up to the expectations it sets for itself? Does it make you want to seek out more of Carr’s work?
2. Carr paints a complex portrait of his parents, and particularly of his mother. Do you feel that his portrayal was fair?
3. In the short section where Carr meets and describes his uncles, he is not particularly sympathetic. Do his descriptions conform with your previous impressions of those two writers? Did he make you think of them differently?
4. In this book we get a portrait of Esther Kreitman from her son’s point of view. Does this book make you want to seek out her own writing? How might it paint a different picture of this complicated writer?

—Ezra Glinter

Explore the below sections to learn more about The Forgotten Singer

Learn more about The Forgotten Singer
Multimedia Resources

Learn more about The Forgotten Singer

Growing up in London during World War I, Maurice Carr—born Morris, or Moshe, Kreitman—knew that his family was special. Most of the time, it didn’t feel that way. His parents struggled to make a living and had to move frequently, sometimes relying on charity. His mother suffered from epileptic fits, and his father was frequently absent. At school he was picked on by antisemitic bullies. But Carr’s sense of specialness wasn’t mere fantasy. His uncles, Isaac Bashevis and Israel Joshua Singer, were famous Yiddish writers. His mother was also a writer, although far less acclaimed than her brothers. Eventually, Carr would grow up to become a novelist and translator himself, as well as a successful journalist in Paris. But he never forgot his humble beginnings, nor his mother’s bitter estrangement from her acclaimed family.

Carr’s childhood memoir, The Forgotten Singer, provides a poignant glimpse into his earliest years as well as a portrait of his mother, Esther Kreitman, whose literary work has only recently begun to be recognized. Along the way he provides us with sketches of his better-known uncles, and his own hardscrabble upbringing in interwar London. Published in English for the first time, The Forgotten Singer gives us a behind-the-scenes look at Yiddish literature’s most famous family, while succeeding as a touching coming-of-age story in its own right.

Although less famous than her two brothers, and later to begin writing, Kreitman was actually the oldest of the Singer siblings and had considerable influence on her two younger brothers; both of them used the events of her (rather unhappy) life in their own work. Born in Bilgoraj, Poland, in 1891, Kreitman had a difficult childhood. According to Carr’s account she was rejected by her mother and overlooked in favor of her younger brothers. In several of her novels she depicts a female protagonist’s desire for education, likely reflecting her own frustrations as a young woman. In 1912 she agreed to an arranged marriage with diamond cutter Avraham Kreitman and moved to Antwerp, although the couple was forced to relocate to London at the outbreak of World War I. The marriage, never happy, eventually broke down entirely and the couple became estranged.

Despite the many obstacles she faced, and the fact that neither of her brothers seemed interested in her literary career, Kreitman eventually published several novels and short story collections, as well as translations into Yiddish. (She translated Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism two years after it was published.) Her books include Der Sheydim-Tants (1936), translated by Carr as Deborah; Brilyantn (1944), translated by Heather Valencia as Diamonds; and Yikhes (1949), translated by Dorothee van Tendeloo as Blitz and Other Stories. Kreitman died in London in 1954.

Multimedia Resources

Read an excerpt from The Forgotten Singer at the Jewish Book Council.

Watch an oral history interview with Maurice Carr’s daughter, Hazel Carr.

Read Esther Kreitman’s Yiddish books in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.

Read about the Singer siblings.

Watch the recording of the presentation by Ezra Glinter and Max Weinreich.

Watch a video about Esther Kreitman from the World Jewish Congress:

Read an essay about Esther Kreitman by Clive Sinclair in Lilith magazine.

Read obituaries for Esther Kreitman in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.