- Person
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Lived
- 1903–1991
- Field
- Yiddish literature
- From
- Polish-American
The story
Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up in a rabbi's home on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw and in the small town of Biłgoraj, surrounded by a rich store of Jewish folktales. For decades he wrote only for adults, in Yiddish, for newspapers in New York. Then, in his early sixties, on the advice of his translator Elizabeth Shub, he began writing for children.
The first result was Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966), translated from Yiddish by Singer and Shub and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. The title story is set at Hanukkah in a Polish Jewish village. A poor furrier sends his son Aaron to sell the family's old goat, Zlateh, to the butcher, but the boy and goat are caught in a blizzard. They shelter for three days in a haystack, where Zlateh's milk keeps Aaron alive, and he brings her home to a family overjoyed to see them both. The Jewish Virtual Library notes that Singer was acclaimed for this book about animals, children and supernatural creatures.
Zlateh the Goat was a Newbery Honor Book in 1967, and two more of his books, The Fearsome Inn and When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw, received the same honour. The German translation won the German Youth Literature Prize in 1969, and in 2000 School Library Journal named Zlateh one of a hundred books that shaped the century. It was also made into a short film.
In all, Singer published 14 children's books, including The Fools of Chelm and Their History, Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and Elijah the Slave. Illustrators included Sendak, Margot Zemach, Uri Shulevitz and Irene Lieblich, a Holocaust survivor from Zamość, near where Singer grew up. He personally chose Lieblich for A Tale of Three Wishes and The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah because her images of shtetl life matched his own memories, and he wrote that her work was faithful to Jewish life and the Jewish spirit. His memoir for young readers, A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, won the National Book Award for children's literature in 1970.
Translated into many languages, Singer's children's stories still introduce readers around the world to the humour, wisdom and warmth of East European Jewish folklore.
Why it matters
Singer's children's books passed the folklore and warmth of East European Jewish life to new generations of young readers.
About Isaac Bashevis Singer
Yiddish storyteller of Gimpel the Fool, The Magician of Lublin and Enemies, A Love Story, who kept a vanished Polish-Jewish world alive and won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.
More about Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Isaac Bashevis Singer's first novel was Satan in GorayIsaac Bashevis Singer's first novel, Satan in Goray, serialised in 1933, explored a messianic movement in a Polish Jewish village after the 1648 massacres.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer championed compassion for animalsIsaac Bashevis Singer was a prominent vegetarian for the last 35 years of his life, arguing that justice must extend to animals.
- Singer used his Nobel lecture to honour YiddishIn his 1978 Nobel lecture, Isaac Bashevis Singer paid tribute to Yiddish as a language of exile that had no words for weapons and still held treasures for the world.
Sources
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Wikipedia
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Jewish Virtual Library
- Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories Wikipedia
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