Surprising literary ventures | 30 September 2006

My Love Affair with Miami Beach (1991)
by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the 1978 Nobel laureate, wrote mainly on the Jewish experience in pre-war Poland, the Holocaust, Israel, and the diaspora to the USA, particularly New York, not an awful lot about Miami Beach. But Miami Beach nevertheless held a special place in his heart: it was his home for much of the latter part of his life, and was the hub of a unique population of elderly Jews in flight from the rigours of the northern US climate. My Love Affair with Miami Beach, for which Singer provided the text, is a photographic tribute to this suburb, with its art deco hotels, nursing homes, barber shops, Judaica stores and synagogues. As Singer puts it, ‘It was remarkable: Jewishness had survived every atrocity of Hitler and his Nazis against the Jews … What I learned is that many people from the shtetlach [small villages], which I knew so well, came here, and some of them continued their love affairs … And I could see that what I wrote in my stories about the shtetlach happened right here.’