- Person
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Lived
- 1903–1991
- Field
- Yiddish literature
- From
- Polish-American
The story
Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up in a rabbi's household in Warsaw, where, as he recalled, the eternal questions mattered more than the latest news. His father's home on Krochmalna Street served as a rabbinical court, and Jewish law and ethics were part of everyday life. As an adult he remained preoccupied with justice and with the suffering of the innocent, and in his own life he extended that concern to animals.
For the last 35 years of his life Singer was a prominent Jewish vegetarian. He believed that eating meat was a denial of all ideals and all religions, asking how anyone can speak of right and justice while taking an innocent creature and shedding its blood. When asked whether he had become a vegetarian for health reasons, he famously replied that he did it for the health of the chickens.
He wove the theme into his fiction. In his story "The Slaughterer", a ritual slaughterer struggles to reconcile his compassion for animals with his job of killing them. Vegetarianism recurs in his novel Enemies, A Love Story, where a character compares the treatment of animals to the cruelty humans inflict on one another. In his story "The Letter Writer" he wrote a line comparing the suffering of animals to the camp of Treblinka, which became a classic reference for people comparing the exploitation of animals with human atrocities.
In the preface to Steven Rosen's 1986 book Food for Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions, Singer argued that people who pray for mercy but refuse to extend it to other creatures are being inconsistent, and that he could never accept inconsistency or injustice. He added that he would remain a vegetarian even if a voice from God told him otherwise.
The Jewish Virtual Library notes that he and his wife Alma both loved living creatures and spent a great deal of time feeding the birds in the park. Singer's moral voice, carried by his fame as a Nobel laureate, continues to encourage readers to widen the circle of compassion to every living creature.
Why it matters
Singer's moral voice helped widen the circle of compassion, inspiring many readers to think about how they treat animals.
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.
- 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
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.