Lost landscapes

When Agata Tuszynska, a Polish historian and best-selling author, began reading the novels and short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, she found in them not just literary characters and plots, but fascinating details of the missing world of Polish Jews - a world permanently erased by the Holocaust and the subsequent forty-five years of Communist rule. Singer, the only writer working in Yiddish to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an avid chronicler of that once rich and vibrant culture. So, surrounded by silent mementos of that lost world - an overgrown cemetery full of broken…