front cover of The Gift
The Gift
A Novel
Florence Noiville
Northwestern University Press, 2012
This moving fictional memoir begins as a woman heads home after a meeting regarding her inheritance. Rebeling against the legalese uttered by the attorney, her mind drifts back to her childhood and she sees her life with sudden clarity. On the train, she jots down a few notes, which prompt the poetic outpouring of memory and emotion that make up this delicate novel.

The narrator’s mother looms large in her psyche. Labeled “eccen­tric” or “Italian,” her mother in fact suffered from what was later found to be manic depression. Without understanding the disease, the fam­ily treated the unpredictable ups and downs of her condition as they struck. During periods of paralyzing depression she was hospitalized, and the family felt abandoned. During periods of manic productivity and overdrive, she was a dedicated pharmacist, an exemplary home­maker, and an unusually knowledgeable gardener. 

This sparse novel draws the portrait of a grand and unforgettable lady, loving and unable to love at once. Her bequest is as much a ma­terial one as it is an emotional one, and, the author surmises as she glances at her own daughters, a genetic one.
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Isaac B. Singer
A Life
Florence Noiville
Northwestern University Press, 2008

In this vivid biography, Florence Noiville offers a glimpse into the world of this much-loved but persistently elusive writer: Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer (1904–91) is generally recognized as the most popular Yiddish writer of the twentieth century. His widely translated body of work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, is beloved around the world. But although Singer was a very public and outgoing figure, much about his personal life remains unknown.

Singer was greatly influenced by his early years in Poland, with his rabbi father and rationalist, secular mother. His interest in themes of faith and dilemma stem directly from this set of conflicts; he bounced back and forth between revering and fighting orthodoxy. This was not the only paradox in his life, however: this man, who wrote many successful children’s books, had abandoned his first wife and only son in Poland as the Nazis began to sweep across Europe. His novels and stories are recognized for their mystical, folkloric tone and his public image was that of a grandfather or uncle; but he was wracked with self-doubt, a womanizer, and, as Noiville writes, a “modern virtuoso of anguish, inhibition, and fiasco.”

Noiville speaks to these and other paradoxes surrounding her subject, drawing on letters, personal stories, Singer’s own autobiographies, and interviews with friends, family, and publishing contemporaries. She travels as he did, from Poland to New York to Florida, tracing his journey from penniless immigrant to Nobel laureate. By pursuing Singer’s public and private past, she rebuilds his story and the story of the world he wrote from: a Yiddish world, a Poland removed from history by Nazi Germany.

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front cover of The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking
The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking
Conversations about Art and Performance
Charles Rosen and Catherine Temerson
Harvard University Press, 2020

Brilliant, practical, and humorous conversations with one of the twentieth-century’s greatest musicologists on art, culture, and the physical pain of playing a difficult passage until one attains its rewards.

Throughout his life, Charles Rosen combined formidable intelligence with immense skill as a concert pianist. He began studying at Juilliard at age seven and went on to inspire a generation of scholars to combine history, aesthetics, and score analysis in what became known as “new musicology.”

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking presents a master class for music lovers. In interviews originally conducted and published in French, Rosen’s friend Catherine Temerson asks carefully crafted questions to elicit his insights on the evolution of music—not to mention painting, theater, science, and modernism. Rosen touches on the usefulness of aesthetic reflection, the pleasure of overcoming stage fright, and the drama of conquering a technically difficult passage. He tells vivid stories about composers from Chopin and Wagner to Stravinsky and Elliott Carter. In Temerson’s questions and Rosen’s responses arise conundrums both practical and metaphysical. Is it possible to understand a work without analyzing it? Does music exist if it isn’t played?

Throughout, Rosen returns to the theme of sensuality, arguing that if one does not possess a physical craving to play an instrument, then one should choose another pursuit. Rosen takes readers to the heart of the musical matter. “Music is a way of instructing the soul, making it more sensitive,” he says, “but it is useful only insofar as it is pleasurable. This pleasure is manifest to anyone who experiences music as an inexorable need of body and mind.”

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