Isaac Bashevis Singer, Polish-American author, was admired for his re-creation of the forgotten world of provincial 19th-century Poland and his depiction of a timeless Jewish ghetto existence.
Background
Singer was born on November 21, 1902 in Leoncin, Poland. His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj. Both his older siblings, sister Esther Kreitman (1891-1954) and brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893-1944), became writers as well. Esther was the first of the family to write stories.
The family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva. After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the family moved to a flat at ul. Krochmalna 10. In the spring of 1914, the Singers moved to No. 12. The street where Singer grew up was located in the impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter of Warsaw. There his father served as a rabbi, and was called on to be a judge, arbitrator, religious authority and spiritual leader in the Jewish community.
Education
In his family's rabbinic tradition, Singer was groomed for Hasidism, attending a Rabbinical Warsaw Seminary. However, he decided on a writing career. He later received several honorary titles from various universities, including Doctor of Humane Letters from Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, in 1963, and Doctor of Letters from Long Island University, in 1979.
Career
After completing his seminary studies, he worked as a journalist for the Yiddish press in various parts of Poland. Emigrating to the United States in 1935, Singer became a reporter for the Daily Forward in New York City, America's largest Yiddish newspaper. Although he personally adapted to his new habitat, his early literary efforts display nostalgia for the "old country"; the subjects seem part of a distant past remembered from vivid tales of Polish storytellers.
Singer's first novel, The Family Moskat (1950), was likened by critics to the narratives of Ivan Turgenev and Honoré de Balzac. Based on Singer's own family, the novel succeeds in translating the almost metaphysical existence of an orthodox Jewish home into a universal reality. Two short stories, "Satan in Goray" and "The Dybbuk and the Golem" (1955), treat the provincialism, superstition, and naiveté of eastern European peasants.
A collection of short narratives, Gimpel, the Fool, and Other Stories (1957), reworked earlier themes but skillfully avoided repetition. Beneath the grotesque and folk elements, Singer includes in "Gimpel" a psychological-theological moral conflict in which an uncomplicated man finds his idyllic existence threatened by black magic and sorcery.
Still grappling with the modern experience, Singer sets the 11 short pieces of The Spinoza of Market Street (1961) in a post-World War II Polish ghetto. Having departed from his quaintly provincial world into contemporary urban madness, he revealed the stylistic limitations of his simple, flowing prose range.
The Slave (1962), an epic of 17th-century Poland, recounts the brutal world of Russian Cossacks through the eyes of an enslaved, sensitive, pious Jew; yet somehow the work appeals to modern sensibilities. Once again Singer's flawless prose recaptures a timeless folk element.
When a collection of vignettes filled with memories of Singer's childhood in the Warsaw ghetto, A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1969), won the National Book Award for children's literature. A Friend of Kafka, a collection of short fiction, appeared in 1970.
Recipient of numerous other literary awards, Singer remained an active journalist and critic for the Daily Forward throughout. His "simple" and "unchanging" fictions paradoxically have gained in popularity with a new generation possessing a taste for an obscure and sometimes grotesque past which seems more tangible than a nebulous future, for his stories capture the essence of the human condition.
Singer continued to publish new material until his death, which occurred on July 24, 1991, in Surfside, Florida.
Singer was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He is famous for his works, for which he received numerous awards throughout the latter portion of his life.
In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann née Haimann (1907-1996), a German-Jewish refugee from Munich. They married in 1940, and their union seemed to release energy in him; he returned to prolific writing and to contributing to the Forward.
Father:
Pinchos Menachem Singer
Mother:
Basheve Zylberman
Spouse:
Alma Haimann
Brother:
Israel Joshua Singer
He was a Polish American novelist who wrote in Yiddish.
Sister:
Hinde Ester Singer Kreytman
She was a Yiddish-language novelist and short story writer.
