Isaac Bashevis Singer

Origins and early life

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1903 in the village of Leoncin near Warsaw, into a Jewish family whose Polish spelling of his name was Icek Hersz Zynger; the exact date is uncertain, most sources giving 11 November. His father Pinchus-Mendel was a Hasidic rabbi, his mother Szewa Zilberman the daughter of rabbis, and he took his pen name Bashevis from her first name.

Work and career

The family settled in 1908 at 10 Krochmalna Street in the poor Yiddish-speaking quarter of Warsaw, where his father served as rabbi, judge and arbitrator, and that street furnished him with a world for the rest of his life. His sister Esther Kreitman and his brother Israel Joshua were novelists before him. In 1935, four years before the German invasion, Singer emigrated to the United States, arriving with three words of English and taking work on the Yiddish daily Forverts.

He wrote everything he published first in Yiddish, and later translated it into English with editors and collaborators; Saul Bellow's 1953 translation of Gimpel the Fool opened him to American readers. In novels and stories — The Family Moskat, The Manor, The Spinoza of Market Street, A Crown of Feathers — he set down the faith, folklore, appetites and quarrels of a Jewish Eastern Europe that had been destroyed, and then the immigrants' harder American life.

He received two U.S. National Book Awards and the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, an honour to the Yiddish language as much as to him. He died at Surfside, Florida, on 24 July 1991.