TORONTO —

Singer, the winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in literature, was nostalgically remembered at a forum sponsored by Luminato, the Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity.

Singer was analyzed by three published authors – Joseph Kertes, David Bezmozgis and Dara Horn, TOP LEFT, – earlier this month at the Al Green Theatre, in the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre.

Kertes, the dean of Humber College’s department of creative and performing arts, is the author of Gratitude, which was Penguin’s lead fiction title in its spring catalogue.

Bezmozgis wrote Natasha and Other Stories, which won the City of Toronto Book Award in 2004.

Horn, named one of Granta magazine’s Top Young American Novelists, has written two novels, In the Image and The World to Come, both of which were the recipients of the National Jewish Book Award in the United States.

All three panelists delivered succinct appraisals of Singer, whose books range from Satan in Goray (1955) and The Manor (1967) to Enemies, a Love Story (1972) and Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1983).

Born in Poland in 1902, Singer immigrated to the United States in 1935 to join his elder brother, Israel Joshua. He  attained international fame after the American novelist Saul Bellow translated his collection of short stories, Gimpel the Fool, into English in the mid-1950s. Singer died in 1991.

Kertes, the founder of Humber College’s creative writing program, suggested that Singer brought a storehouse of memories and impressions of Poland to his adopted homeland, and wrote unapologetically in Yiddish.

He was an outsider, yet he was imbued with a modern sensibility.

At heart, Singer was a storyteller whose self-professed role was to pay homage to a venerable and accomplished Jewish community that would virtually be wiped out by the Nazis.

Bezmozgis, an immigrant like Singer, noted that his body of work can be divided between the Polish shtetl and the post-war world.

Bezmozgis – who was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973 and immigrated to Canada with his family when he was six years old – praised Singer’s storytelling skills, but criticized his lack of attention to style.

Reading an excerpt from Enemies, a Love Story, he described it as a book that manages to distil many of Singer’s themes.

Bezmozgis also read excerpts from his still uncompleted second novel, which is set in Soviet-occupied Latvia during World War II and is suffused with a sense of hard realism and disillusionment.

Horn, who is young enough to be Singer’s great-granddaughter, said that he bridged the real and the surreal.

Born in New Jersey in 1977, Horn earned a Ph.D in comparative literature from Harvard University. She observed that Singer’s commercial success stemmed in part from his ability to portray himself as an American writer, even though he primarily viewed himself as a Yiddish writer.

She added that Singer understood the need to promote his novels and short stories and realized the importance of having them translated into English.

In a critique, she said that he was “a bit lazy” stylistically, at least later in his career, and that he falsely presented himself as “the last voice of Yiddish literature” when, in fact, the opposite was  really true.

Turning an old saying on its head, Horn, a fluent Yiddish speaker, elicited waves of laughter when she joked that she and her husband converse in Yiddish when they don’t want their parents to understand what they have just said.