Isaac Bashevis Singer

Author

• Born: July 14 or November 21, 1904
• Birthplace: Leoncin, Poland, Russian Empire (now in Poland)
• Died: July 24, 1991
• Place of death: Surfside, Florida

Polish-born writer

Over a period of six decades, Singer produced a substantial body of work in multiple genres: novels, short stories, plays, autobiography, and books for children. As he re-created and interpreted the Jewish experience in the vanished villages of Eastern Europe and in twentieth century America, he explored such universal concerns as the war between good and evil, the search for love, and what it means to be human.

Area of achievement: Literature

Early Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer (I-zihk bah-SHEH-vihs SIN-gur) was born in Leoncin, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1904. His father, Pinkhos Menakhem Singer, traced his lineage back to a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism. From Pinkhos Menachem, Isaac Bashevis Singer derived his mystical streak. His mother, Basheve Zylberman, the daughter of the Bilgoray rabbi who opposed Hasidism, provided Singer a model of rational skepticism. In 1908, the family relocated to a three-room apartment at 10 Krochmalna Street, Warsaw, which the author would commemorate in such works as Mayn Tatn’s Bes-din Shtub (1956; In My Father’s Court, 1966) and Neshome Ekspeditsyes (1974; Shosha, 1978). Warsaw remained printed in Singer’s mind, serving as setting and inspiration for much of his work long after he had settled in the United States.

Famine and illness caused by World War I drove Singer’s mother to take him and his younger brother Moishe to Bilgoray in 1917. There Singer read widely, encountering both Baruch Spinoza and tales of Jewish mysticism. In Bilgoray, he also saw Judaism untainted by modernism. Singer later remarked that without his years in Bilgoray he could not have written Der Sotn in Gorey (1935; Satan in Goray, 1955) and Di Familye Mushkat (1950; The Family Moskat, 1950).

Returning to Warsaw in 1921, Singer enrolled in the Tachkemoni Rabbinal Seminary but left a year later. He went back to Bilgoray and became a tutor in a nearby town. Singer’s story “A Tutor in a Village” draws on this experience. In 1923, Singer’s older brother Israel Joshua, already an established writer, secured his sibling a job as proofreader for the Warsaw Yiddish weekly Literarische Bleter (literary pages), which Israel Joshua cofounded. Two years later, Singer published “Oyf der elter” (“In Old Age”) in that journal; the story won first prize in a contest the periodical sponsored. Other stories followed in that weekly, in the newspaper Ha-yom (today), and in the Paris Yiddish paper Parizer Haynt (Paris daily). His affair with Runia Shapiro produced a son, Israel. Shapiro and Singer separated in 1935. She and her son eventually moved to Israel, where Israel assumed the surname Zamir (songbird). Singer would not see his son for twenty years, but Zamir became one of his father’s translators and joined him in Stockholm in 1978 for Singer’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Life’s Work

In 1932, Singer and Aaron Tseytlin founded the short-lived Yiddish magazine Globus, in which Satan in Goray was serialized the following year before being published as a book by the P.E.N. Club in 1935. This volume appeared on the eve of Singer’s departure for the United States. His older brother had moved to the United States in 1933 and was working for the Forverts (forward) in New York; Singer joined him at this publication, which serialized his next novel, Der Zindiker Meshiekh (the sinning messiah), dealing with the false messiah Jacob Frank.

Lost in America (1980) described Singer’s despondency during his first years in New York. In 1937, he published only four stories. He earned his sixteen dollars a week from the Forverts by translating works into Yiddish and by writing a nonfiction column, “It’s Worthwhile Knowing.” In 1937, he met Alma Haimann Wasserman at Mountaindale in the Catskills. Two years later she left her husband and two children to move in with Singer; on February 14, 1940, the two married.

The year 1943 marked the end of Singer’s creative drought: He produced five significant stories, including “The Destruction of Kishinev” and “The Unseen.” Though set in the past, these two tales depict the same destruction of shtetls (Jewish villages) that was occurring under the Nazis. With the death of Israel Joshua on February 10, 1944, Singer no longer stood in his older brother’s shadow. Singer’s two family sagas, The Family Moskat and Der Hoyf (1953-1955; The Manor, 1967, and The Estate, 1969) serve as tributes to Israel Joshua, whose work they mirror.

Saul Bellow’s translation of Singer’s “Gimpl Tam” (1945) in 1953 in Partisan Review and the story’s reappearance in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories and More Stories in the Modern Manner in 1954 won him new Anglophone readers and also an introduction to Cecil Hemley of Noonday Press. Noonday was acquired by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy (later Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which became Singer’s publisher. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Singer was published in America’s leading magazines, including Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, where most of his stories first appeared, as well as in Playboy, GQ, and Mademoiselle.

Urged by his friend and translator Elizabeth Shub, Singer began writing children’s stories. His first book for young readers, Zlateh the Goat, and Other Stories (1966), was illustrated by Maurice Sendak and won a Newberry Award. Over the next decade he produced fourteen books for children and collected a variety of literary awards, including National Book Awards for A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1969), only the second children’s book to receive this honor, and for his short-story collection A Crown of Feathers, and Other Stories (1973). In 1978, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Singer’s last decade he continued to publish books, though much of the material in them had been written previously. The Penitent (1983), for example, had been serialized inForward in 1973. The Image, and Other Stories (1985) and The Death of Methusaleh, and Other Stories (1988) gathered stories Singer had published in various magazines. Singer died of a stroke in Surfside, Florida, on July 24,1991.

Significance

Singer was the best-known, and perhaps the best, Yiddish writer of the twentieth century; he was the only twentieth century Yiddish writer to receive a Nobel Prize. Through his translations he introduced readers of all faiths to the vanished world of Eastern European Jewry. His historical novels, such as Satan in Goray and The Family Moskat, re-created a life that had ceased to exist even before the Holocaust. After World War II he continued to write about and thus preserve the shtetls for posterity.

Though he always wrote about Jewish subjects, Singer’s concerns were universal. In his 1978 Nobel Prize lecture, Singer observed that “Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.” The Nobel Prize committee’s citation made the same point, noting that while Singer’s work derives from the Polish Jewish experience, it “brings universal human conditions to life.” Singer regarded himself as a storyteller rather than as a sage. Nonetheless his writings, like all great literature, impel readers to a deeper investigation of themselves, other people, and the world in which they live.

Bibliography

Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. In her psychological examination of Singer, Hadda peers behind the image of Singer as grandfatherly sage to reveal a vexed and troubled man. She is especially informative about stage and film adaptations of his works.

Stavans, Ilan, ed. Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album. New York: Library of America, 2004. This companion volume to the Library of America edition of Singer’s short fiction uses text and fascinating photographs to trace Singer’s life. It also includes illuminating comments from eight literary figures, including Cynthia Ozick and Francine Prose, who knew the author.

Tuszyńska, Agata. Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. New York: William Morrow, 1998. Tuszyńska writes about Singer and the Polish world that shaped him. She also quotes from her interviews with many who knew Singer.