Janet Hadda

ISAAC SINGER'S fiction is, like Hawthorne's, gothic and grotesque; like Gogol's, fantastic and satiric; like Dostoevsky's, feverish and horrific. His dominant themes are the conflict with evil, the search for God, the vital connection between demonic possession and creative power, the attraction of the mystical, the pull of the perverse and the slavish pleasures of sex. Singer wrote in Yiddish, a Germanic language written in Hebrew letters and read from right to left.

TO William Burroughs, it was "insufferable" -- a sign that The Man was reaching his tendrils deep into a poet's psyche. To some Beats and fellow travelers, Allen Ginsberg's time in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was sent by a judge as a very young man, seemed like a scene from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": establishment America grinding down a free spirit.

Immediately after UCLA professor Louis Ignarro won the Nobel prize for medicine, he thought of his mother. How would she handle it? Of course, she'd be proud that her son had been anointed one of the smartest men in the world, thanks to his work uncovering the role nitric oxide plays in regulating the cardiovascular system. But how would the 85-year-old Italian immigrant explain to her friends that her son's scientific breakthrough led to the invention of Viagra?

The timing couldn't be more perfect. In the aftershock of a verdict in the O.J. Simpson civil trial, Viking plans to rush 1 million copies of Marcia Clark's "Without a Doubt" into bookstores this spring. Faster than you can say Bruno Magli, Clark will begin what her publisher calls "a blockbuster marketing campaign," hitting 12 cities and making scores of appearances in lecture halls, and on radio and TV.

Yiddish has been dying a slow death for at least 50 years, but lovers of the Jewish language of Eastern European villages and East Coast immigrant slums still cling to the mame-loshn , their mother tongue, even in Southern California. They go to literary lectures, informal discussion groups, classes and songfests. Orthodox Jews sometimes debate the Talmud in Yiddish. Old people on bus benches in Jewish neighborhoods gossip in the language of their youth.

Yiddish has been dying a slow death for at least 50 years, but lovers of the Jewish language of Eastern European villages and East Coast immigrant slums still cling to the mame-loshn , their mother tongue, even in Southern California. They go to literary lectures, informal discussion groups, classes and songfests. Orthodox Jews sometimes debate the Talmud in Yiddish. Old people on bus benches in Jewish neighborhoods gossip in the language of their youth.

Yiddish has been dying a slow death for at least 50 years, but lovers of the Jewish language of Eastern European villages and East Coast immigrant slums still cling to the mame-loshn , their mother tongue, even in Southern California. They go to literary lectures, informal discussion groups, classes and songfests. Orthodox Jews sometimes debate the Talmud in Yiddish. Old people on bus benches in Jewish neighborhoods gossip in the language of their youth.