Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1903 in the village of Leoncin, near Warsaw, the son of a Hasidic rabbi; the family moved to Warsaw when he was a small child, and the teeming Jewish street of Krochmalna, where his father kept a rabbinical court, became a lasting source for his fiction. During the First World War he lived with his mother in Biłgoraj, a traditional shtetl where her family were rabbis. Following his elder brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer, he left religious study for secular literature, working as a proofreader and translator in Warsaw and publishing his first novel, Satan in Goray, in 1935.

That same year he emigrated to New York, where he wrote for the Yiddish daily Forverts, which serialised most of his fiction. Writing in Yiddish all his life, he worked closely with translators on the English versions, which reached a wide audience after Saul Bellow’s translation of the story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ appeared in 1953. His novels and stories — The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, The Slave, Enemies, A Love Story — move between the shtetl, prewar Warsaw and postwar America, and are full of desire, doubt, folk belief and the supernatural, told with an unsentimental storyteller’s economy.

Singer also wrote memoirs and children’s books, winning the National Book Award for both children’s literature and fiction. The Nobel Prize in 1978 was the first awarded for work written in Yiddish, and he used his lecture to speak for a language and a people decimated by the Holocaust. He spent his last years in Surfside, Florida, where he died in 1991.