IN MY FATHER’S COURT by Isaac...

IN MY FATHER’S COURT by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Noonday: $12). In this affectionate memoir, the Nobel Laureate uses his skills as a novelist to re-create the vanished world of Chasidic Judaism in pre-World War I Poland. Singer’s severely pious father presided over a rabbinical court in lower-class Warsaw, where he settled religious and quasi-legal questions involving marriages, divorces and property settlements. These disputes brought a curious assortment of people to the family apartment, and Singer recalls their stories: a dying man who divorced his wife so she wouldn’t be compelled to marry her brother-in-law after her husband’s death; a gang of street thugs and their fence; the aged, ostentatiously pious Reb Moishe Ba-ba-ba, who walked through the building courtyard with his eyes closed rather than risk the temptation of looking at a woman. Singer’s father was so completely fixated on the Torah and its commentaries that he remained determinedly ignorant of the world around him. He decried every real or imagined transgression against religious laws and customs as a sign that the world was coming to an end--unaware that his world would soon be brought to an end by people whose crimes would eclipse his darkest nightmares.