A rabbi’s son on Krochmalna Street
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born Icek Hersz Zynger in the village of Leoncin, near Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. The date is uncertain: most scholars place it in late 1903, while the birthday he long gave out, 14 July 1904, appears to have been invented in his youth, possibly to dodge the draft. His father, Pinchas Mendel, was a Hasidic rabbi; his mother, Bathsheba, came from a family of rabbis in Biłgoraj, and it was her name, in Yiddish, Basheve, that he would later turn into his pen name, Bashevis.
Three of the Singer children became writers. His sister, Esther Kreitman, was the first to write stories, and his elder brother, Israel Joshua Singer, became a celebrated novelist. In 1908 the family settled in Warsaw at 10 Krochmalna Street, in a poor, teeming, Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter. There his father served as a rabbi and judge, settling disputes, divorces and questions of ritual law in the family’s apartment. Young Isaac listened from the next room, absorbing a lifetime’s supply of human comedy and sorrow that he would later turn into the memoir In My Father’s Court.
Between faith and doubt
The hardships of the First World War broke up the household. In 1917 Isaac went with his mother and younger brother, Moshe, to Biłgoraj, a traditional shtetl where his mother’s brothers served as rabbis. The isolated town gave him an intimate knowledge of old Jewish village life, and also of the forbidden books, Yiddish translations of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Maupassant and Strindberg, that reached it from America. He read Spinoza and the Kabbalah, and found that his questions about God and suffering would not go away.
He enrolled briefly at the Tachkemoni rabbinical seminary in Warsaw but soon realised that neither the school nor the rabbinate suited him. After a spell teaching Hebrew in Biłgoraj, he felt himself a failure. In 1923 his brother rescued him with a job as proofreader at the Warsaw literary journal Literarishe Bleter. In the cafés and writers’ club of the city he joined the secular bohemian world his brother had entered before him, while never quite escaping the world of his father.
First books in Warsaw
Singer’s first published story, “In Old Age”, won a literary competition run by Literarishe Bleter in 1925. In 1933 his first novel, Satan in Goray, appeared in instalments in Globus, a literary magazine he had co-founded with his lifelong friend, the poet Aaron Zeitlin. Set in a Polish town after the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648, it tells how the false messiah Shabbetai Zvi drives a traumatised community into frenzy and ruin. Its last chapter imitates the style of an old Yiddish chronicle, and its picture of innocence crushed by mass hysteria seemed, to later readers, to foreshadow the catastrophe ahead.
By then Singer had a son, Israel, born in 1929 to his companion Runia Pontsch. Watching the rise of Nazism in neighbouring Germany, Singer decided to leave. In 1935 he emigrated to New York to join his brother. Runia and their son went to the Soviet Union and later to Palestine; father and son would not meet again for twenty years.
Lost in America
Singer arrived in the United States knowing, he later joked, only three words of English. He found work writing for the Yiddish daily Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward), but for several years he felt adrift and barely able to write, a period he later titled Lost in America. In 1938 he met Alma Wassermann, a German-Jewish refugee from Munich; they married in 1940 and she gave him the stability to work again. He became an American citizen in 1943.
In 1944 Israel Joshua died suddenly in New York. Singer revered him as his greatest artistic example and dedicated to him The Family Moskat, a vast novel of a Warsaw Jewish family from the late nineteenth century to the German invasion. Serialised in the Forward, its frank scenes, including adultery on the eve of Yom Kippur, so alarmed the editor, Abraham Cahan, that he nearly stopped it, but readers demanded more. Meanwhile, the war was destroying the very world Singer wrote about. His mother and younger brother, deported by the Soviets to Central Asia, died there; the Jews of Krochmalna Street and Biłgoraj were murdered in the Holocaust.
Gimpel and the leap into English
The turning point came in 1953, when Saul Bellow translated Singer’s story “Gimpel the Fool” for the Partisan Review. The tale of a gullible baker who is mocked, cheated and betrayed by everyone, yet keeps his faith and his goodness, astonished American readers. A collection, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, followed in 1957, and Singer began working closely with translators to produce English versions of his work, which then became the basis for translations into dozens of other languages.
Over the next three decades he published at least eighteen novels and more than a dozen story collections, including The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Slave (1962), The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), Short Friday (1963), The Manor and The Estate, Enemies, A Love Story (1972) and Shosha (1978). His stories ran in The New Yorker, Esquire and Playboy. They are populated by demons and dybbuks, rabbis and harlots, scholars and swindlers, rendered with a candour about desire that shocked some Yiddish readers, and with a deep, ironic tenderness for human weakness. He also wrote much-loved children’s books, among them Zlateh the Goat, illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
Singer named his masters of the short story as Chekhov, Maupassant and “the sublime scribe of the Joseph story in the Book of Genesis.” As a young man he had translated Knut Hamsun and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain into Yiddish, and his family sagas owe something to Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but his heroes are different: lonely, stubborn individualists torn between the life they lead and the life they feel they should lead. In a 1974 interview he said that every truly sensitive person feels isolated, and that because he believed the purpose of literature was to stress individuality, he could not help stressing human loneliness as well.
The Nobel Prize and the case for Yiddish
In 1978 the Swedish Academy awarded Singer the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” He had already won two National Book Awards, for the memoir A Day of Pleasure (1970) and the collection A Crown of Feathers (1974). In his Nobel Lecture in Stockholm he used the occasion to defend the language of a murdered people, which many regarded as dying. Yiddish, he said, was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Kabbalists, rich in humour and memory.
The prize gave Yiddish literature a global audience it had never had. Films soon followed: The Magician of Lublin (1979), Barbra Streisand’s Yentl (1983), adapted from his story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”, an adaptation Singer publicly disliked, and Paul Mazursky’s Enemies, A Love Story (1989), about a Holocaust survivor in New York tangled between three wives. Artists including Maurice Sendak, Raphael Soyer and Larry Rivers illustrated his books, and, together with Czesław Miłosz, he became one of the rare American Nobel laureates in literature never to have won a Pulitzer Prize.
A private mystic
Singer’s relationship with Judaism was complicated. Raised Orthodox and steeped in Torah and Talmud, he stopped attending synagogue, even on the High Holy Days, yet believed in God and described his outlook as a kind of private mysticism. He was openly angry with a God who permitted so much suffering, above all the Holocaust. Still, he lived his whole life among Jews, preferred the company of those born in Europe, and wrote only in Yiddish, though he also spoke Hebrew, Polish and English.
For the last thirty-five years of his life he was a committed vegetarian, a conviction rooted in his compassion for animals; in his story “The Letter Writer” a character reflects that for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka, a line that has become a touchstone for animal-rights writers. He and Alma lived for many years in the Belnord apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the couple were known for feeding the birds in the park. In 1955 he was reunited with his son, Israel Zamir, who had grown up in Palestine and Israel, and that year made his first trip to Israel.
Last years and legacy
In later life Singer and Alma spent winters, and eventually their retirement, among the Jewish community of Surfside, Florida. After a series of strokes he died there on 24 July 1991. He was buried with a traditional Jewish service at Cedar Park Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey. Streets in Surfside, New York, Tel Aviv, Lublin, Biłgoraj and his birthplace, Leoncin, now bear his name.
Singer remains the only Yiddish writer to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and for millions of readers his stories are the most vivid picture they will ever have of the Jewish towns of Poland before the Holocaust. He did not write elegies; he wrote living people, with all their appetites and doubts, and in doing so he made a lost civilisation feel close and real. The Library of America published his collected stories in three volumes in 2004.
Sources & further reading
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Wikipedia · Isaac Bashevis Singer, Facts, NobelPrize.org · Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lecture, NobelPrize.org · Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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