Daniel Singer (26 September 1926 – 2 December 2000) was a Polish-American socialist writer and journalist. He was best known for his articles for The Nation in the United States and for The Economist in Britain, serving for decades as a European correspondent for each magazine.

Gore Vidal described Singer as "one of the best, and certainly the sanest, interpreters of things European for American readers", with a "Balzacian eye for human detail". Mike Davis labelled Singer "the left's most brilliant arsonist", with a talent for "set[ting] ablaze whole forests of desiccated cliches".

Biography

Early life

Singer was born in 1926 in Warsaw, in his parents' home. His father, Bernard Singer, was to become a well-known journalist, but was impoverished at the time of Daniel's birth. His mother, Esther Singer, was a teacher, and the child of wealthy Jewish parents. Esther, a Marxist, interested both Daniel and a young Isaac Deutscher in left-wing politics, and specifically the ideas of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. As Daniel aged, his father became more financially successful, and the family was able to move out of the ghetto. Esther quit her job, and Daniel attended a school where he was the only Jew in his class.

Education and escape from Holocaust

In 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Singer and his sister and mother were staying in southern France. They went to Paris in an attempt to book passage to Warsaw but could not. Instead, after the occupation of Paris by the Germans, Singer and his mother and sister left Paris. They went first to Angers, where he went to the Lycée David d'Angers, then to Toulouse (Lycée Lakanal), and after to Marseille (Lycée Thiers). In the beginning of August 1942, the French police came to arrest them; his sister jumped through the window from the second floor, broke her leg, and was sent to the hospital, while he was away in the countryside with some school friends and learned about his sister coming back home. With the help of the resistance, first Singer and then his mother and sister escaped to Switzerland. Meanwhile, his father was arrested by the Soviet Union, which had occupied eastern Poland under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and was sent to the gulag for two years and released when the Soviet Union entered the war before being allowed to leave for London.

Political views

Singer's writing was always deeply influenced by his interest in politics, and specifically the process of political change. Throughout his adult life, Singer was a socialist but a critic of the Soviet Union. Influenced by anarchism, Trotskyism, and various newer dissident schools of Marxism, he was devoted ultimately to the political ideas of Marx and Luxemburg. Singer retained an optimism about the prospects for socialism, writing shortly before his death: "There is no certainty about the future. Humanity has the capability of destroying itself, and it may very well do so. The hope is with the younger generation. They will not be able to run away from the problems of the world the way our generation did and the next generation has. But our grandchildren will have to deal with the contradictions."

The Road to Gdansk (1981)

The Road to Gdansk, published by Monthly Review Press in 1981,

Is Socialism Doomed? (1988)

Is Socialism Doomed? The Meaning of Mitterrand was published by Oxford University Press in 1988. Singer argued that the disappointment of Mitterrand for socialists demonstrated not that socialism is a futile project but that Mitterrand had not really attempted it.

Whose Millennium? (1999)

Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? was published by Monthly Review Press in 1999.</blockquote>

Barbara Ehrenreich described the book as "magisterial in its historical sweep [and] fiercely democratic in its vision", providing "the thinking person's bridge to the 21st Century". The title comes from a phrase Singer once used to describe himself, referring to his narrow escape from the Holocaust.

References

  • The Nation articles
  • Daniel Singer Archive at marxists.org
  • Website of the Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation