Nobel Author Singer Speaks At Sanders

Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer entertained an audience of more than 600 in Sanders Theater last night by reading two of his short stories on life in a Warsaw ghetto.

The lecture, sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, was highlighted by the humor and wit of the 81-year-old writer, who also fielded questions from the audience.

In the first of Singer's stories, a fictional character named Dr. Gottlieb was the main character in "The Missing Line," and reasoned that there must be a rational explanation for even the most mysterious events.

Specifically, Gottlieb was able to logically explain how a line of text from his submitted analysis of Emanual Kant ended up in a news article on rape in an entirely different publication.

"Who was it who said that 99 percent of all writers don't die of cancer or consumption [tuberculosis] but of printing mistakes?" Gottlieb quipped, after discovering that the misplacement was due to printer error.

The second story Singer read. "A Piece Of Advice," was a more serious and religious piece that featured a man trying to control his wild temper. The man learned from a Hasidic holy man to flatter even those people he really wanted to insult.

The moral of the story, said Singer is "don't listen so much to your emotions; freewill is expressed best in deeds not in feelings."