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Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) - pseudonym Warshofsky |
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Polish-born American journalist,
novelist, short-stfory writer, and essayist, who won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1978. Isaac Bashevis Singer's chief subject is the traditional Polish
life in various periods of history, largely before the Holocaust. He
especially examined the role of the Jewish faith in the lives of his
characters, who oscillate between passion and asceticism, magic and
religious devotion. "Our house was a house of learning. My father sat all day long and studied the Talmud. Whenever my mother had a free minute, she glanced into a holy book. Other children had toys, but I played with my father's books. I started to "write" even before I knew the alphabet. I would dip a pen in ink and scribble. I also liked to draw—horses, houses, dogs. The Sabbath was an ordeal for me, because it is forbidden to write on that day." (A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw by Isaac Bashevis Singer, with photographs by Roman Vishniac, [New York]: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1986, p. 6; first published in 1969) Isaac Bashevis Singer was born Icek-Hersz Zynger in the town of
Radzymin, near Warsaw, Poland. He was the youngest of five children of Pinkhos Menakhem Singer,
a Hasidic rabbi, and Basheve, the daughter of the Bilgoray Rabbi, who
was an opponent of Hasidism. ". . . my father believed in authority.
For him, if a man was a holy man, everything he said was right. But my
mother felt that no matter who the man was, if he spoke nonsense, it's
nonsense. In this respect I am like my mother." (Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Richard Burgin, Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1985, p. 7) When Singer was three the family moved to Warsaw. His father supervised a beth din, or rabbinical court, where he acted as a rabbi, judge, and spiritual leader. Singer also spent several years in Bilgoray, a traditional Jewish village. He received traditional Jewish education and became acquainted with Jewish law in Hebrew and Aramaic texts. All in the family liked to tell stories and at a very young age Singer started to invent his own tales. At the age of fourteen, Singer began studying Polish, which astonished his father, who said: just when the Messiah is about to come at any moment (as he thought), his son is going to try and learn Polish. Singer entered in 1920 the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary, but then returned to Bilgoray, where he supported himself by giving Hebrew lessons. In 1923 Singer moved to Warsaw, where he worked as a proofreader for the Literarische Bleter, edited by his brother Israel Joshua Singer. In addition, Singer rendered into Yiddish German thrillers and works from such authors as Knut Hamsun, Thomas Mann, and Erich Maria Remarque. From 1933 to 1935 he was an associate editor of Globus. As a novelist Singer made his debut with Der Sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray), which was published in Poland in 1932. It was written in a linguistic and rhetorical style imitative of mediaeval Yiddish book of chronicles. The story was loosely based on the events surrounding the 17th-century false messiah Shabbatai Zvi. In his later work, The Slave (1962), Singer returned again to the 17th-century in a love story about a Jewish man and gentile woman, whose relationship is threatened by their different backgrounds. In 1935 Singer joined the staff of the Jewish Daily Forward
as foreign correspondent. Following his brother, and to flee from anti-Semitism, Singer moved in
1935 to the United States, parting from his mistress Runia Shapira and their son, Israel Zamir,
born in 1929. Zamir later became a journalist and writer, and translated
many of his father's works into Hebrew. Runia, who had adopted a
Communist worldview, went to Moscow. After being expelled from the
Soviet Union, she settled withIsrael Zamir in Palestine in a kibbutz. In New York Singer worked for the
Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts. When many secular Jews supported communism in the political atmosphere of the 1930s and '40s, Singer was interested in demons and dybbunks, sticking to his convinction, that "a good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind." In 1940 Singer married Alma Haimann Wassermann, a German émigré from a wealthy mercantile family. She did not speak Yiddish and had two childred from her previous marriage. They had met at a Catskill resort in 1937. At that time Singer considered himself as an ex-writer, nothing was yet translated. "The very first thing I found out after we were settled in out new home was that we had no money at all for furniture and curtains, for linens and all the other appurtenances," Alma recalled. But the couple bought a writing desk; it remained with Singer until his death. (Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life by Jante Hadda, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, p. 99) Alma was employed as a saleslady by a New York department store. Singer became an American citizen in 1943. The Family Moskat (1950), a "Jewish Buddenbrooks" translated from the Yiddish by A. H. Gross, was a success and established Singer's literary reputation. The family saga continued in The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969). Gimpel the Fool, the first collection of Singer's stories in English, came out in 1957. The much anthologized title story ('Gimpl tarn'), set in a Polish shtetl in the nineteeth century, is narrated by a modest baker ridiculed by everybody. Translated by Saul Bellow, it first appeared in Partisan Review (Vol. 20 No. 3 1953). "I am Gimpel the Fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny, and fool. The last name stuck." (Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to The Letter Writer by Isaac Bashevis Singer, New York: Library of America, 2004, p. 5) Stories published in Daily Forward were later collected among others in In My Father's Court (1966) and More Stories from My Father's Court (2000). Singer's father appear them as a pious man who is happiest studying the Talmud; his mother is practical and wishes her husband would pay more attention to money and everyday problems. With his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964, Singer became its only American member to write in a language other than English. "Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity." ('Nobel Prize Lecture' by Isaac Bashevis Singer, 8 December 1978; https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/.Accessed 1 July 2025) The New York Times reported in 1970 that his annual income comfortably exceeded $100,000. Singer published 18 novels, 14 children's books, a number of essays, articles, and reviews, but in the United States he was perhaps best-known as a short story writer. Although his works are best known in their English versions, he originally composed them in Yiddish. From 1971 he signed them as "Bashevis" or "Bashevis Singer." Singer collaborated with many distinguished translators, most frequently with Elizabeth Shub, who met him shortly after his arrival in the United States. Among the films based on Singer's stories are The Magician of Lublin (1979), directed by Menahem Golan, Barbara Streisand's Yentl from 1983 (Singer did not like what Streisand did with his book), and Enemies: A Love Story (1989), directed by Paul Mazursky and starring Anjelica Huston, Ron Silver and Lena Olin. Mazursky cowrote the screenplay with Roger L. Simon. Anjelica Huston received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress and Mazursky and Simon were nominated for best screenplay. The central character, Herman Broder, is a Jewish intelletual who manages to escape death in the Holocaust (the film has no death camp scenes). He settles in Brooklyn and learns after a new marriage, that his first wife, Tamara (played by Huston), has also survived and come to America. The Magician of Lublin (1960),
translated into several languages, is about a lusty magician and his
downfall. Milton Hindus wrote that Singer's prose, "at least in the
Yiddish original, is stripped, hard and bright in the best modern
manner, and, fortunately, a good deal of his original power survives in
English." ('Yasha Escaped Into a Prison' by Milton Hindus, The New York Times, June 26, 1960) In Shosha
(1978), a love story set in Poland in the 1930s, Singer looked back to the
Krochmalna street of his childhood. Singer's short story collections
include A Friend of Kafka (1970), The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories
(1988). The quasi-autobiographical novels, such as In My Father's Court and Love and Exile (1984)
focus mostly on Singer's Hasidic upbringing in Poland and his
subsequent rebellion against it. The attitude of Singer's characters to
religion was not fixed; the author himself avoided ideological
rigidity. He maintained that a "a belief in God is as necessary as sex." ('Singer, Isaac Bashevis,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, p. 1323) Singer's novels have realistic social and natural settings; he pays much attention to the plot and characters, especially their
sexual passions, but on the other hand he deals with spiritual truths
and magic beyond everyday life, which separate his stories from
traditional realism. "It seems that the analysis of character is the
highest human entertainment.," Singer once said. "And literature does
it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names." ('Isaac Bashevis Singer Talks …About Everything,' an interview with Richard Burgin, The New York Times, Nov. 26, 1978) As a
writer Singer saw his role marginally influential or as he remarked:
"Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things,
God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't
change anything." (The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations, edited by Connie Robertson, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1998, p. 399) For most of the last 14 years of his life, Singer was assisted by Dvorah Telushkin, who met Singer in 1975, when she was 21. Telushkin gave an account of their relationship in her book Master of Dreams (1997). "Even now twelve years after his passing, he still seems to be directing the show. Throughout the years of writing this memoir, I often felt Isaac's presence in the room, hovering in a specific corner. He was a benign spirit, patient and protective." (Ibid. p. xvi) Isaac Bashevis Singer died on July 24, 1991. Israel Joshua Singer
(1893-1944) was Singer literary role model. He worked as a journalist in Warsaw during
the 1920s and early 1930s, where he wrote his first novels. In 1922 he married Genya Kuper; they had two sons. After
immigration to the United States, the writings appeared in serialized form
in newspaper Forverts (Jewishv Daily Forward). Israel Joshua was more
politically engaged than his brother. He travelled widely in the Soviet
Russia in 1926, but became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet
political system. His works include Erdvey: drama i dray bilder (1922), Perl: un andere dertseylungen (1922), Shtol un ayzn (1927, Blood Harvest, tr. 1935; Steel and Iron, 1969), Josche Kalb (1932, The Sinner, tr. 1933; Yoshe Kalb, tr. 1965), Affremder erd (1925), Di brider Ashkenazi (1936), Friling (1937), The River Breaks Up (1938), Khaver nakhmen (1939; East of Eden, tr. 1976), Di mishpokhe Karnovski (1943, The Family Carnovsky, tr. 1969), Dertseylungen (1949). The
three-volumed The Brothers Askhenazi was set in the Polish
city of Lodz, and covered a period from the early years of the nineteenth
century until 1919. – The sister of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Esther Singer (born in Radzymin, Poland, in 1891), married name Kreitman, was a writer in her own right. Her works include the novel Der Sheydims Tants (1936) published in Warsaw, and translated in
English as Deborah (1946). When it was republished in England by Virago Press in 1983, Singer refused to say anything about the book. For further reading: The Forgotten Singer: The Exiled Sister of I.J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Memoir by Maurice Carr (2023); Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer by David Stromberg (2017); The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer by Seth Wolitz (2011); Guide to the Works of Isaac Bashevis Singer by Maxine A. Hartley (2009); Isaac B. Singer: A Life by Florence Noiville (2006); Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album by Ilan Stavans (2004); Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Bibliography of His Works in Yiddish and English, 1960-1991 by Roberta Saltzman (2002); Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland by Agata Tuszynska and Madeline Levine (1998); Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer by Dvorah Telushkin (1997); Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life by Jante Hadda (1997); Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. by Grace Farrell (1996); Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children's Stories and Childhood Memoirs, ed. by Alida Allison (1996); Understanding Isaac Bashevis Singer by Lawrence S. Friedman (1988); Recovering the Canon: Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. by David Neal Miller (1986); Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer by Richard Burgin (1985); Fear of Fiction: Narrative Strategies in the Works of Isaac Bashevis Singer by David Neal Miler (1985); The Brothers Singer by Clive Sinclair (1983); The Singer Saga by Charles M. Eastley (1983); Isaac Bashevis Singer by Edward Alexander (1980); Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Magician of West 86th Street: A Biography by Paul Kresh (1979); 'Singer, Isaac Bashevis,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Isaac Bashevis Singer by Irving Malin (1972); Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. by Irving Malin (1969) Selected works:
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