Isaac Bashevis Singer

Yiddish stories that brought the vanished world of Polish Jews back to life

• He is the only writer in Yiddish to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his Nobel lecture he said the prize also honored Yiddish, a language of exile with no land and no government behind it.^{[3],[7],[9],[10]}
• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe describes him, in translation, as among the most widely read authors of the twentieth century.^[6]
• His children's books, begun in his sixties, won three Newbery Honors (1967 to 1969) and the 1970 National Book Award for children's books, and were translated into more than a dozen languages.^{[8],[19],[20]}
• His story collection A Crown of Feathers won the 1974 National Book Award for fiction, which it shared with Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.^[15],[20]
• In 1943, as the murder of Europe's Jews became known, he urged Yiddish writers in America to turn to the past and keep alive the East European Jewish world being wiped out. His saga The Family Moskat followed that world through its rise and ruin.^[6]
• His work was adapted for stage and screen, including the films Yentl (1983) and Enemies, A Love Story (1989), about Holocaust survivors in New York after the war.^[8],[10]

Singer's impact is cultural, and it cannot honestly be counted. He carried Yiddish literature, and the destroyed Jewish world of Poland, to readers around the world at the very moment that world vanished. His stories gave readers of every background a way into Hasidic courts, shtetl markets and Warsaw courtyards, and his later fiction showed Holocaust survivors struggling to rebuild their lives in America. His Nobel Prize, the only one ever given to a Yiddish writer, publicly honored a language whose European heartland had been destroyed in the Holocaust. His children's books brought Jewish folklore to young readers in more than a dozen languages. We record no numbers: sales and readership figures for his books are scattered and incomplete, and there is no credible way to measure how literature changes lives. His record also carries real criticism, including his abandonment of his young son, his conduct toward women, and translations that reshaped his Yiddish originals.

Culture

No number is given here on purpose. Some contributions cannot be counted honestly, and we would rather describe them than invent a figure.

• Moderate

  Left his young son behind for 20 years

  When he emigrated in 1935, Singer left behind his partner Runia Pontsch and their five-year-old son, Israel. Mother and son eventually moved to Israel, where the boy took the surname Zamir. Father and son did not see each other for twenty years. Later, Zamir became one of his father's translators and went with him to Stockholm for the 1978 Nobel ceremony.^{[9],[11],[13]}

• Minor

  Affairs, including with women who translated his work

  Singer stayed married to Alma Wasserman from 1940 until his death, but was involved with other women. A 1997 biography by the Yiddish scholar Janet Hadda portrays him as prone to blatant sexual liaisons. A documentary, The Muses of Bashevis Singer, gathered accounts of his affairs with translators and others; Hadda said more than one translator told her he had slept with all his translators except her, a claim that cannot be verified.^{[8],[12],[13]}

• Minor

  Translations that reshaped the Yiddish originals

  Singer dictated first drafts of his English translations and required that other languages translate from the English. Critics say the English versions changed the tone and content of the originals and sometimes cleaned them up; a Hebrew translator insisted on working from the Yiddish for that reason. Since relatively little of his work was published as Yiddish books, scholars still disagree about what his authentic body of work is.^{[6],[8],[13],[15]}

• Minor

  Accused of distorting Jewish life and eclipsing other Yiddish writers

  Detractors, including some Yiddish writers, said he turned the old country into kitsch full of demons and dybbuks, that his sexual preoccupations gave Jews a bad name, and that he soaked up the limited attention Americans gave Yiddish literature when, they argued, writers such as Jacob Glatstein or Chaim Grade deserved it more. Cynthia Ozick satirized this resentment in her novella Envy; or, Yiddish in America.^[13],[15]

• 1908

  Poverty

  From 1908 his family lived on Krochmalna Street, in one of Warsaw's poor, overcrowded Jewish quarters.^[2],[8]

• 1917

  War

  Famine and illness caused by World War I drove his mother to take him and his younger brother from Warsaw to her father's shtetl, Biłgoraj.^[8],[9]

• 1935

  Discrimination

  Jews in interwar Poland faced discrimination in the army, civil service and universities. It grew worse from 1935, the year he emigrated: more quotas on Jewish students, segregated ghetto benches, expulsions from professional associations and pogroms.^[16]

• 1935

  Exile

  Alarmed by Nazism and worsening conditions for Polish Jews, he emigrated to New York in 1935, leaving his mother, younger brother and son behind. For years he lived in poverty and could barely write.^{[9],[10],[11]}

• 1942

  Persecution

  The Jewish Warsaw of his childhood was destroyed. German forces confined its Jews in a ghetto, and by May 1943 had deported more than 275,000 people from it to be murdered at the Treblinka killing center.^[17],[18]

• —

  Family killed

  In the early 1940s his mother, Batsheve, and younger brother, Moyshe, were sent by the Soviets in cattle cars to the Jambyl region of Kazakhstan, where they died of illness and starvation.^[6],[14]

Both of Singer's parents were Jewish. His father, Pinkhos Menakhem Singer, was a Hasidic rabbi, and his mother, Batsheve Zylberman, was a rabbi's daughter; his pen name, Bashevis, comes from her first name. He was raised in a strictly observant home and briefly trained to be a rabbi, but, like his older brother, he left religious life for secular writing. In his Nobel lecture he said he came to doubt all revelation, yet could not accept that the universe was an accident. He wrote in Yiddish, which he called his mother tongue, all his life, and set almost all his work among Jews.^{[2],[3],[4],[6],[8],[11]}

1. July 14, 1904

   Born Icek-Hersz Zynger in Leoncin, near Warsaw, son of a rabbi and a rabbi's daughter. This is the official date; his estate gives 1903, and one critic says probably 1902.^{[1],[7],[8],[15]}

2. 1908

   The family moves to Krochmalna Street in Warsaw's poor Jewish quarter, where his father runs a rabbinical court from their home.^{[3],[8],[9],[10]}

3. 1917

   Wartime hunger and disease drive his mother to take him and his younger brother to her father's shtetl, Biłgoraj.^[8],[9]

4. 1921

   Enrolls at the Tachkemoni rabbinical seminary in Warsaw, but leaves after about a year.^[6],[9]

5. 1923

   Becomes a proofreader at the Warsaw Yiddish journal Literarishe Bleter, co-founded by his older brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer.^[6],[8],[9]

6. 1925

   His first published story, In Old Age, wins the journal's fiction prize.^[1],[6],[8]

7. 1935

   His first novel, Satan in Goray, appears as a book in Warsaw. He emigrates to New York and joins the Yiddish daily Forverts, where he publishes under several pen names for the rest of his life.^[6],[8],[9]

8. 1943

   Becomes a U.S. citizen. His older brother dies the following year.^[6],[8]

9. 1945

   The Forverts begins serializing The Family Moskat, his saga of Warsaw Jewry, dedicated to his late brother.^{[7],[10],[11]}

10. 1953

    Saul Bellow's English translation of Gimpel the Fool appears in Partisan Review and wins him a large new readership.^[7],[8],[9]

11. 1967

    Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, his first children's book, is named a Newbery Honor Book, the first of three in three years.^[8],[19]

12. 1974

    A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories wins the National Book Award for fiction, his second National Book Award.^[15],[20]

13. December 10, 1978

    Receives the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm, the only Yiddish writer to win it.^[1],[5],[7]

14. July 24, 1991

    Dies in Surfside, Florida, after a series of strokes.^[1],[7],[10]

1. 1.Isaac Bashevis Singer - Facts · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach)
2. 2.Isaac Bashevis Singer - Biographical · NobelPrize.org (from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980), 1978
3. 3.Isaac Bashevis Singer - Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1978 · NobelPrize.org, 1978
4. 4.Isaac Bashevis Singer - Banquet speech, 10 December 1978 · NobelPrize.org, 1978
5. 5.The Nobel Prize in Literature 1978 - Award ceremony speech by Lars Gyllensten · NobelPrize.org, 1978
6. 6.Singer, Isaac Bashevis (Joseph Sherman) · The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
7. 7.Biography · The Estate of Isaac Bashevis Singer
8. 8.Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center (Biographical Sketch) · Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
9. 9.Isaac Bashevis Singer (Research Starters) · EBSCO
10. 10.Nobel winner I.B. Singer dies at 87 · The Baltimore Sun (New York Times obituary text), 1991
11. 11.Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life by Janet Hadda (review by Edward Alexander) · Commentary, 1997
12. 12.Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life by Janet Hadda (review) · Publishers Weekly, 1997
13. 13.A Harem of Translators (Shoshana Olidort) · Jewish Review of Books, 2016
14. 14.A Letter to Mama (story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, introduction by David Stromberg) · Jewish Review of Books, 2019
15. 15.A Guide to Isaac Bashevis Singer · Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012
16. 16.Poland: Poland from 1795 to 1939 (Gershon Bacon) · The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
17. 17.The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Holocaust Encyclopedia) · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
18. 18.Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto (Holocaust Encyclopedia) · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
19. 19.Newbery Medal Winners & Honor Books, 1922-Present · Association for Library Service to Children, American Library Association
20. 20.Isaac Bashevis Singer (awards and finalists) · National Book Foundation