Janet Hadda. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 243pp. $27.50 (cloth).
This, as Lord Jeffrey famously declared, will never do. Janet Hadda, professor of Yiddish at UCLA, has produced a thin, patchy, slapdash biography of a writer who deserves much better. Singer (1904-91), it must be admitted, is an elusive subject, and Hadda has been forced to sift through piles of hearsay (just whom did the notoriously promiscuous Singer sleep with?) and endless autobiographical ...