When Isaac Bashevis Singer emigrated from Poland to America in 1935, he left behind his wife and five-year-old son, Israel, with the promise to send for them as soon as he got settled. He never did. Mother and child moved first to the USSR and ultimately to Israel, where Zamir grew up on a kibbutz. In 1995, 20 years after their separation, Zamir came to New York to meet his father. Singer's strengths and failings, his methods of working, his passion for the Yiddish language, and his lust for words, for women, and for life, all come to new light in Zamir's candid and touching account. This memoir is not only a personal and moving portrait of one of this century's major writers, but also an honest exploration of the often charged and complex relationship between son and father.

Author Biography

Israel Zamir is the son of Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. He is a journalist, the author of "Turn Off the Sun," and translator of his father s works."