Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904-1991), a Polish-born author, won the 1978 Nobel Prize in literature. Singer, who wrote in Yiddish, was the son of a rabbi. He was educated in a rabbinical seminary in Poland, and his Jewish education and Polish background form the basis of his writing. Singer’s best-known tales are romantic or legendary rather than realistic. The narrators in some of his stories are imps or demons. Many of his works combine modern realism with Jewish folklore and fantasy.
Singer was born on July 14, 1904, and grew up in a poor section of Warsaw. He described his life there in A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1969). Singer also wrote three other volumes of autobiography: A Little Boy in Search of God (1976), A Young Man in Search of Love (1978), and Lost in America (1981).
Alarmed by the threat of Nazism in Europe, Singer moved to the United States in 1935. Many of his works first appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper published in New York City, and were later translated into English.
Singer’s novels include Satan in Goray (1935), The Family Moskat (1950), The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Slave (1962), Enemies: A Love Story (1972), Shosha (1978), Scum (1991), and Shadows on the Hudson (published in 1997, after his death). A work serialized between 1952 and 1955 was published as two novels, The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969). Singer also became known for his short stories. Almost 200 of his stories appeared in the three-volume Collected Stories (published in 2004, after his death). Singer died on July 24, 1991.
