Preface IN THE TEN years I knew Isaac Bashevis Singer, between April 1978
and about the time he left the University of Miami in 1988, I
discovered in him a tendency to exercise his literary skills to remark-
able daily effect. He did not merely use his abilities when he formally
created his fictions, either alone or when we worked together on his
translations. He rewrote all day—and, he assured me, while he
dreamed at night—everything around him, people, events, geogra-
phy, and moral assumptions. Complete in himself, confident of what
he understood of narrative, he would correct and revise for people
who told him what they thought was a good story. He would pick and
choose for me a living person's traits that he wished to embellish as
if all that mattered was that he had the final say on whatever, however
remotely, touched him. Surfside, Florida, a community on the northern outskirts of Miami
Beach, where he had purchased a condominium ...
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