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FUTURE NOBEL LAUREATE AND YIDDISH author, who situated many of his best short stories on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also made his home there. His phone number was listed. He was famous for permitting just about anyone to drop by.
    It took me some time to screw up the courage to call. I did so in part because I was fast becoming aware that my plan to be a distinctly “Jewish writer” was considered to be something of a career hazard by not a few of my teachers, themselves Jews, who warned me on the sly to avoid the label “Jewish writer” by any and all means.
    One I recall in particular, who advised me, face screwed up in distaste: “All the New York intellectuals are really Jewish writers, but none of them, not even Roth or Bellow, cop to it. Only Malamud—the third of that ‘Hart, Shaffner, and Marx’ of literature—proclaims it, and he’s the weakest of the three! There’s Ozick, of course: she’s very out about it. But on the whole, publishers don’t really like the ‘Jewish shtick.’ And the lit mags, well, they’re all run
by Wasps like George Plimpton. Want to get ahead as a writer? Don’t be too Jewish in your work.”
    â€œWhat about I.B. Singer?” I said.
    I remember the look I got. “Sing-er?” His voice dropped. “You want to end up like that?”
    I kind of did.
    After moving to the Upper West Side, I would often spot Singer, already old, dressed in a dignified blue suit, shuffling down the dingy Broadway sidewalks, careful of pigeons, fitting right in with the boulevard’s rich stew of old Jews with numbered arms, young seedy hotshots loitering outside the Off-Track Betting Office, Puerto Ricans and blacks crowding the Chinese-Spanish restaurants, and aproned Italian hot dog vendors with cigars poking from their mugs. I wanted to be like him, a writer hidden among life’s weeds, one who cared for ragged birds and conversed with everyday folks. I never dared approach Singer in the Four Brothers Restaurant, where he sometimes went to eat, or in Famous Dairy, his usual lunch spot. But I needed to speak with him, badly. I sensed that only he could help.
    For all the well-meaning advice that I’d been handed, I was in fact now incurably cursed with Jewish Writeritis. In the wake of Wiesel’s class, whenever I set pen to page, out popped some Jewish character anguishing over the Holocaust. I felt like a throwback to another age. It was the Seventies, but I wasn’t hip: I was obsessed with Auschwitz. My fellow writers effulged in prose about smoking pot and free love, but I wrote about a lonely Jewish survivor who spoke to his parrot and a dreamy sculptor who perished in the gas chambers. To make matters worse, I had launched, with my own meager resources, the Jewish lit mag and it was how people most identified me. I had gone from a cool Kerouac type to a pathetic, outmoded Sholom Aleichem, on my way to committing professional suicide.

    I felt that only Singer would understand, and so I called.
    â€œWho is this?”
    â€œAlan Kaufman,” I said.
    â€œHow can I help you, Mr. Kaufman?”
    â€œMr. Singer,” I began, heart racing, “I’m a college-aged writer, a novice. I publish a Jewish magazine. My mother was in the Holocaust.”
    There was a tired pause. “Your mother, she was in the war?”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    Another pause, this one kinder somehow. “I see. And so. I can help you with something?”
    â€œPlease, may I…come see you?”
    He considered. Then: “So, come. The address you know?”
    I read it off the telephone directory listing.
    â€œGood. You’ll be here soon?” He seemed almost concerned for me.
    â€œRight now!”
    â€œI’m the building on the left, off the courtyard. Goodbye.”
    I ran the thirty blocks, and when I reached his amazing building on West 86th Street, a giant wedding cake of a thing