Sanford Sternlicht G’62, professor of English in The College of Arts and Sciences, will present a lecture on the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer at 10 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 13, at Temple Adath Yeshurun. Sternlicht’s presentation will launch a new series of lectures sponsored by the temple’s recently resurrected Adult Education Committee.
“When a lecture series was discussed at a meeting, I immediately thought of Professor Sternlicht. I have attended several of his lectures in town and found him to be an enlightening and engaging speaker,” says committee member Bonnie Koreff-Wolf.
A former U.S. Navy officer, writer-theater director and scholar, Sternlicht has served as “Speaker in the
Sanford Sternlicht
Humanities” for the New York Council for the Humanities since 2009. He has lectured nationally on behalf of the English Speaking Union of North America and has published several books, including his two best-sellers, “The Tenement Saga” (Terrace Books, 2004) and “All Things Herriot” (Syracuse University Press, 1995).
A scholar of U.S. immigrant literature, Sternlicht will focus his lecture “Issac Bashevis Singer: His Life and Times” on the prolific author of novels like “The Slave” and “Reaches of Heaven.” Singer was a native of Poland who in 1978 became the only Yiddish-speaking recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, delivering his entire acceptance speech in the now-endangered language.
“Yiddish was a great language. It had many millions of speakers and most of them were murdered in the Holocaust. The Nobel Prize is the world prize for literature and even the translation of his acceptance speech was brilliant. There’s a certain poignancy to the language and his achievement because the language is really dying,” says Sternlicht.
In addition to his lecture at Temple Adath Yeshurun, Sternlicht will resume his duties as speaker in the humanities in November, lecturing throughout New York State before traveling to Washington, D.C., to make a presentation at the Library of Congress on May 19, 2014.
