Telushkin, Dvorah.

American translator and storyteller; worked as personal secretary and assistant to author Isaac Bashevis Singer from 1975 to 1987.

Dvorah Telushkin was born February 12, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York. She attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush and studied at Bard College and Columbia University. Telushkin met author Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1975, when she was twenty-one years old and unable to afford the cost of a creative writing course that Singer was teaching at Bard College. She wrote to Singer, offering to drive him between Manhattan and the college in return for auditing the class. This led to a position as his personal secretary and assistant that lasted for twelve years.

Telushkin’s first marriage was to photojournalist Abraham Menashe, with whom she has one daughter. She married Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in 1988; they have three children and currently reside in New York. Telushkin, who studied Yiddish at Columbia University, has translated short stories by Singer and other Yiddish writers, and she also performs at storytelling festivals.

Telushkin wrote about her years with Singer in a memoir, Master of Dreams (1998).