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Isaac Bashevis Singer. Meshugah. Nili Wachtel & the author, trs. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1994. 232 pages. $22. ISBN 0-374-20847-6.
I. B. Singer has created another world in his posthumous novel Meshugah, which reads like an autobiography and was first published serially in 1981-83. The curious title uses the Hebrew word meaning "crazy" or "insane," yet it well describes Singer's characters and their world: a confluence of a sane world and the not so sane, the mysterious, the mystical, and the profane juxtaposed; a world of diffused boundaries between life and death, past and present, morality and will, God and man.
This is the story of Nazi survivors living in New York during the 1950s, and especially of the narrator, Aaron Greidinger, who...