Israel Zamir, the 85 year-old son of Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, passed away on Saturday, Nov. 22.
Zamir, who published nine books, including his 1995 “Journey to my Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer,” died at his home in Israel.
In a interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot completed a decade before his death, Zamir described his first meeting with his father, 20 years after having last seen him.
“It was a cold and distant meeting from every side,” Zamir said at the time.
“[My father is] a Yiddishist and I speak Hebrew; he is a reactionary capitalist and I am a Marxist-socialist. I idolized Stalin and he viewed him as a murderer; I rejected the Diaspora and he lived in it; he was a ‘man of air’ and I was a man of the soil. From every perspective we were opposites.” Zamir expressed nearly the identical sentiments in his book “Journey to my Father.”
Zamir was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1929. His father left Poland for the United States in 1935, and Zamir claimed that Singer had promised to bring over his son and wife, but he never did. Instead, Zamir eventually moved with his mother to a kibbutz in Israel.
For nearly 25 years Zamir worked at a left-wing newspaper Al Hamishmar. In 1995 Zamir moved to the centrist Israeli newspaper Maariv.
Zamir’s father passed away in in Florida in 1991.
