Esther Singer Kreitman, 1912. Background photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash
What was it like to grow up as part of one of the most celebrated Yiddish literary families, while being ostracized by its most famous members?
Maurice Carr — born Morris, or Moshe, Kreitman — was the son of Esther Kreitman, a Yiddish writer and the older sister of Isaac Bashevis and Israel Joshua Singer. Born in 1913 in Antwerp, Carr grew up in London where he became a novelist, translator, and journalist who served for several decades as the Reuters correspondent in Paris. In addition to Reuters, his journalism was published by the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, The Jerusalem Post, Maariv, Haaretz, and Commentary Magazine, among others. Carr’s memoir of his childhood, The Forgotten Singer: The Exiled Sister of I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer, was published in 2023 by the Yiddish Book Center’s White Goat Press. The book describes his tumultuous childhood and coming of age as a Yiddish-speaking child of immigrants in interwar London. In this excerpt Carr describes a trip he took with his mother at age thirteen to Poland, where he met both of his uncles for the first time, and witnessed the fraught relationship between his mother and the rest of her family.
— Ezra Glinter
The train pulls into the Warsaw railway terminal. I help my mother down three steep cast-iron stairs onto the platform and we join the crowd streaming to the exit.
“Look, Mama, isn’t that Yitzhak over there?”
In a flash of illumination I recognize the deathly pale scraggly redhead with enormous gray-blue eyes, thin lips, and large ears who stands daydreaming behind the steam engine. He is her younger brother, the one who at dead of night climbed into bed with his sister Hindele. She, terrified of the evil spirits in the dark, enticed him with a temptation he couldn’t resist — she’d tell him a story.
My mother gazes at grown-up Yitzchak in disbelief. He steps forward, darts at her two kisses, which miss either cheek, and strides away. We race after him to another railway station and board a dilapidated old train that chugs slowly out of town, stopping every few minutes to drop off sportily dressed passengers, commuters to dachas. We are left with black-caftaned Jews whose sidelocks and ritual fringes swing to the rhythm of their loud and plain Yiddish.
With the elusive Yitzchak my habitually overeffusive mother is at a loss for words.
We step out onto an open-air platform in the middle of nowhere. A signpost says SWIDER. We walk on burning-hot sand that smothers our feet and enter a forest strewn with pinecones. The air is heady with pine sap and birdsong. The golden sun in the bluest sky I have ever seen spreads light and shade with the absoluteness peculiar to dreams. We enter a fenced-in pinewood estate, and here the waking dream takes an uncanny turn.
Yitzhak is no longer at our side but stands before us grown taller and older. The gaunt face has become handsome; the ears still stick out, but they no longer look like the wings of a bat about to take flight. The massive bulging cranium has lost its mop of red hair, the chin is upturned, stubborn, and most striking of all, the same pale blue eyes are opened wide, but the indifferent faraway gaze has given way to a strange light in the whites of the eyes, a glitter of absolute authority and absolute melancholy.
This is my other uncle, Joshua Singer, or Shiya. With a shriek of mingled joy and pain my mother throws herself upon him in an embrace so passionate as to be more than sisterly. He struggles to disengage himself, takes a backward step, and fixes her with a gaze of mingled sorrow and revulsion.
My mother stands abashed. She blinks frenziedly, bites her lower lip smeared with lipstick, and takes manifest note of what her beloved brother leaves unsaid: “You, Hindele, have been invited to a family reunion out of pity, or call it compassion, but certainly not love. I won’t have you thrust yourself upon me. You have already managed to make a pest of yourself, so the sooner you go back to your unloved husband in London the better.”
For the rest of our stay she will hold herself aloof from Shiya, will look down on his wife Genya as unworthy of him, will ignore and be ignored by Yitzhak, will consort with the dacha literari, and have little to say to me. As of now her past is a closed book, and I have ceased to be her audience.
Swider is the summer dacha of the Yiddish writers and poets. The rented bungalows are scattered far and wide in the pinewoods. These clapboard structures are each composed of a spacious living room flanked on either side by a bedroom and a kitchen, the whole fronted by a veranda on stilts.
Shiya installs a camp bed for me in the family living room. I have no notion where and with whom he accommodates my mother. She joins us for meals, but for the rest spends her time in feverish debate with the writers of mameloshen Yiddish prose and poetry …
… I am cast in the role of the legendary haroeh v’lo nireh, the heaven-sent carnal phantom who sees but cannot be seen by others. This arrangement is heaven on earth for me.
From The Forgotten Singer: The Exiled Sister of I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer by Maurice Carr. Reprinted by permission of White Goat Press.
Maurice Carr (born 1913 in Antwerp, died 2003 in Paris) was a writer, essayist, translator, journalist, and son of Esther Singer Kreitman and nephew of writers Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carr was a Parisian correspondent for the Reuters Agency and editor of Izrael Magazine. As a journalist he worked for the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, The Jerusalem Post, Maariv, Haaretz, and Commentary Magazine, among many others. Under the literary pseudonym of Martin Lea, he published the novel The House of Napolitano.