American (Polish-born) · b. 1902
Polish-born American novelist and Nobel laureate who wrote in Yiddish about vanished Eastern European Jewish life, demons, sexuality, and the spiritual crisis of the modern world.
Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland in 1902, the son of a Hasidic rabbi, and grew up in Warsaw in a world that was already changing faster than its inhabitants could absorb. He absorbed it anyway — the demons and dybbuks of folk tradition, the heated debates of the Yiddish intellectuals, the eruptions of sexuality and doubt that complicated every pious household. He emigrated to New York in 1935, as Hitler consolidated power in Germany and the fate of Polish Jewry was becoming imaginable. Most of his family remained. Most of them were murdered. He never stopped writing about the world they had inhabited as if by writing about it he could hold some of it in place.
For decades he wrote for the Jewish Daily Forward, serializing his novels for an immigrant readership, and his reach in English was limited. Then Saul Bellow translated Gimpel the Fool for Partisan Review in 1953, and everything changed. The major novels — The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, The Slave, Shosha — arrived in English translation across the 1960s and 1970s, and readers encountered a world that was simultaneously archaic and urgently alive: Polish shtetls where Satan walked the streets, scholars tormented by desire, women of terrifying intelligence constrained by impossible circumstances. His short story collections, gathered in volumes like The Spinoza of Market Street and A Crown of Feathers, showed a formal mastery of compression that placed him among the great story writers of the century.
The 1978 Nobel Prize was awarded, as the committee noted, for a body of work written in a dying language. Singer gave his Nobel lecture in Yiddish. He died in 1991, and with him passed the last major writer of the Ashkenazi world that the Holocaust had destroyed — though his books remain, doing the work of memory that nothing else can quite replicate.
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The landmark collection of Singer's short fiction, anchored by 'Gimpel the Fool'—translated by Saul Bellow—in which a village baker who everyone believes is a fool turns out to be the wisest man in Frampol. The other stories range across the shtetl world of pre-war Poland: demons, desire, rabbis, heretics.
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by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Moskat family of Warsaw, from the late nineteenth century to 1939: the patriarch Reb Meshulam's descendants assimilate, secularize, intermarry, embrace Zionism, turn to communism, have affairs, go bankrupt—while Warsaw's Jewish world that contained them is being destroyed. Singer's most comprehensive novel, in the tradition of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.
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by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Yasha Mazur is a traveling magician, acrobat, and womanizer in late nineteenth-century Poland. Ambitious, irreligious, unfaithful to his devoted wife, he is planning a burglary that will free him to elope with an educated Polish woman. The burglary goes wrong. What follows is one of the strangest penitential conversions in modern fiction.
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