"A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind."
Isaac Bashevis Singer
1904-1991
Winner, 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature
Isaac Bashevis Singer is the only
Nobel Prize laureate for
literature to ever have written primarily in
Yiddish. Born in
Radzymin,
Poland, and raised in the
shtetl of
Bilgorai, Singer wrote his numerous books and stories in America, to which he fled from the
Holocaust in 1935. His works ressurect a noble and petty world of
Eastern European Jewry that he knew intimately.
The son of a
Hasidic Rabbi, Singer's stories and novels are populated by the creations of centuries of Jewish
superstition and
folklore:
dybbuks, demons, witches, and goblins, as well as the more friendly
golems and the people of
Chelm. But in addition to a tradition of
Talmud and
Kabbala, he was influenced by
Baruch Spinoza,
Nikolay Gogol,
Leo Tolstoy, and
Fyodor Dostoevsky. His novels and short stories often feature pathetic but pure
martyrs, or alternatively, miserable
moral downfalls that begin when "this one covets the other's broom". His characters are always richly drawn, and many, such as
Yentl the Yeshiva Boy and
Gimpel the Fool have become cultural icons.
I.B. Singer Bibliography:
Novels:
Short Story Collections:
Memoirs:
Children's Books: