- Person
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Lived
- 1903–1991
- Field
- Yiddish literature
- From
- Polish-American
The story
Isaac Bashevis Singer always considered Yiddish his natural tongue. Although he spoke English, Hebrew and Polish fluently, he wrote all his novels and stories in Yiddish and then worked with collaborators on English versions. Many people already called Yiddish a dying language, but Singer believed there was still a large audience, including in New York, longing to read it.
In 1978 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his Nobel lecture he began by reflecting on the writer's task. A storyteller, he said, must first entertain the spirit, since there is no paradise for bored readers, but must also care about a generation that had lost faith in God, in man and in its own institutions. As the son of a people who had received the worst blows that human madness can inflict, he said he could not help brooding about the dangers ahead, yet he still believed in free will and in the power of literature to open new horizons.
He then declared that the honour was also a recognition of Yiddish. He described it as a language of exile, without a land or frontiers or the support of any government, a language that possessed no words for weapons, ammunition or war tactics. The Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos, he said, practised every day what the great religions preached, and were the people of the Book in the truest sense. He recalled his father's home on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw as a study house, a court of justice and a place of prayer and storytelling.
Answering those who called Yiddish a dead language, he pointed out that Hebrew had been called dead for two thousand years before its remarkable revival, and that the classics of Yiddish literature were also the classics of modern Hebrew literature. Yiddish, he said, had not yet said its last word and still held treasures not yet revealed to the world. He ended by calling it, in a figurative way, the wise and humble language of all of frightened and hopeful humanity.
Coming a generation after the Holocaust, the lecture gave Yiddish and the culture of its speakers a place of honour before a global audience.
Why it matters
Singer's lecture gave Yiddish and the culture of East European Jewry a place of honour on the world stage.
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 wrote 14 books for childrenIsaac Bashevis Singer wrote 14 children's books, including the acclaimed Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, some illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
- 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.
Sources
- Isaac Bashevis Singer – Nobel Lecture NobelPrize.org
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.