(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Israel Joshua Singer was a Polish American Yiddish novelist.
Background
He was born on November 30, 1893 in Bilgoray, Poland (then part of the Russian empire), the eldest son and second of the four surviving children of Pinhos-Mendel Singer, a Hasidic rabbi, and Bathsheba (Silberman) Singer, daughter of the licensed rabbi of Bilgoray and a woman of learning in her own right. The visionary, impractical father made a poor living and the family suffered privation. When Joshua was three, they moved to Leoncin, a small town near Warsaw, and in 1908, after a brief stay at nearby Radzymin, to Warsaw.
Education
Joshua was educated from childhood for the rabbinate, but he felt a strong thirst for life and early rebelled against his parents' otherworldliness. Though reading was forbidden in orthodox homes, he secretly read Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish books on secular topics and came in time to reject his religious upbringing altogether. He devoted most of his time to the study of languages, mathematics, and science and sought expression in painting and in writing.
Career
At the age of eighteen he left home. Living in Warsaw without money or a trade, the young rebel barely kept himself alive by doing odd jobs.
During the First World War he spent brief periods as a conscript in the Russian army and at forced labor during the German occupation of Poland in 1915. Ignited, like so many of his contemporaries, by the promise of the Russian Revolution, Singer emigrated in 1917 to the Russian city of Kiev. He worked as a proofreader on a small Jewish newspaper, published short stories in the Kiev daily Naie Zeit, and completed a story, "Pearls, " and two dramas, Three and Earth Woes, which dealt with wars and pogroms.
Three years in Russia, however, brought Singer his second major rejection of belief. Disillusioned with the Bolshevik experiment, he returned in 1921 to Warsaw. Singer now entered vigorously into the literary movements of Warsaw, at a time when Poland was the world center of Yiddish culture.
He was an editor of the Literarishe Bletter, and served as a correspondent for two major Warsaw Yiddish dailies. His story "Pearls, " first published in Warsaw in 1921, attracted the attention of Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward in New York City, who in 1923 invited Singer to become a regular contributor. Renewed contact with the Soviet Union in 1926, as a special correspondent of the Daily Forward, led to his book Nai Russland (1928). His disillusionment was given artistic expression in his novel Steel and Iron (1927) and in Savinkov (1932).
Singer for a time gave up writing. In 1931, however, with the encouragement of Abraham Cahan, he began Yoshe Kalb, a realistic novel about a mystic. Yoshe Kalb, after appearing serially in the Daily Forward, was published in Yiddish and English (as The Sinner) in 1933.
Singer died of a heart attack in New York City in 1944, at the age of fifty.
Singer was basically a disillusioned man unable to resign himself to accepting human limitations. He could find redemption neither for himself nor for his characters. He asked questions, but discarded the answers; he fought for sustaining values, yet denied them.
Connections
In 1918 he married Genia Kupfershtock, a native of Poland. His sons, Jacob and Joseph, were born in Warsaw.