The Lost Photographs Of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Singer poses near representatives of the old generation and the new — characters who wouldn’t have seemed out of place in his stories. Image by David Attie
Editor’s Note
In the summer of 2016, the Brooklyn Historical Society’s exhibit “Truman Capote’s Brooklyn” brought new attention to the late photographer David Attie. Attie, who died in 1982, was perhaps best known for his portraits of such luminaries as Capote, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, Bobby Fischer and Ralph Ellison.
Attie had been a commercial illustrator in the 1950s — working on advertisement and book cover designs — before he made the switch to photography.
Recently, Attie’s son Eli — a TV writer and former Washington speechwriter who wrote for “The West Wing” and worked for Al Gore — discovered a trove of unpublished photos of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The photos, which feature Singer on the Lower East Side and, in one case, in front of a Forward delivery truck, were taken in 1968 for Amerika (aka America Illustrated), a U.S. government publication distributed in the former Soviet Union. To our knowledge, most of these photographs have never been published before.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
