I Spit On Your Grave

Not everyone is happy with all the fuss being made about Isaac Bashevis Singer in his centennial year. Alana Newhouse (NYT) meets Inna Grade:

"I profoundly despise him," said Mrs. Grade, the 75-year-old widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade. "I am very sorry that America is celebrating the blasphemous buffoon." At even the slightest mention of Singer's name — which she will not allow herself to pronounce — Mrs. Grade (pronounced GRA-duh) becomes virtually unhinged. "I despise him especially because he is dragging the Jewish literature, Judaism, American literature, American culture back to the land of Moab," she said, referring to the biblical region where Lot and his daughters began an incestuous affair. "I profoundly despise all those who eat the bread into which the blasphemous buffoon has urinated."

Other critics get even more personal, sneering that "when Abraham Sutzkever was starving, fighting Nazis with the partisans in the Lithuanian woods and writing great Yiddish poetry about the tragic fate of the Jews on fragments of bark, Singer was eating cheese blintzes at Famous Dairy Restaurant on 72nd Street and thinking about Polish whores and Yiddish devils," two subjects his detractors find especially distasteful. The complaints aren't limited to the Jewish community; back in 2000, Richard John Neuhaus editorialized (scroll a bit) that he couldn't understand why Grade was out of print, since his writing had "none of the Fiddler on the Roof kitsch that is too often to be found in the stories of, for instance, Isaac Bashevis Singer with their wandering souls (dybbuks) and other contrivances that turn Eastern European shtetls into set pieces for the borscht circuit."

Whatever you do, don't give these people a copy of Harlan Ellison's "I'm Looking for Kadak."