I.B. Singer

I was prompted by the Wall St. Journal's list of "five best books on Judaism" on Saturday (Yom Kippur) to go to the USF Library and get Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the dairyman, which I had never read, foolishly, because I'd seen the musical. It's wonderful. Incredibly modern.

I pulled down a nearby Isaac Bashevis Singer anthology as well.

Singer had totally escaped my mind, not as a name so much, but as a presence. I just haven't thought of him for ages.

And I used to love him. When I read his stories now, esp. the late ones, the Upper West Side cafeteria ones and the Miami Beach ones, I still love him.

How quickly our four immigrant Nobel Prize winners have faded from consciousness, it seems: Bellow, Singer, Milosz, Brodsky.

Do we have anybody in their league out and about?

Someone whose parents fled the violence in the Punjab? Or Nam? Or Guatemala? Someone who extended a student visa? Or married to get a green card? Or who was already distinguished and accepted a long-term teaching gig, like Wolcott and Heaney and...?

Any chance in hell that our next giant will be the product of a prestigious M.F.A program?