Isaac Bashevis Singer

Second paper (rough draft) due

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991), Poland, USA.

Itzek Zinger became one of the most prolific, controversial, and best-known chroniclers of Eastern European Jewish experience to live and write in the United States. His works are especially informative on Poland, where he was born. His pen author, Bashevis, was taken from his mother’s Hebrew name (Bathsheba); he also wrote under the pen name Warshofsky (tying him to Warsaw). He moved to the US (New York, of course) in 1935 and became a citizen in 1943, but continued to write in Yiddish until the end of his life. Although he eventually learned English well, all his work was translated into English, often by prominent writers. Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, and his works are available in a staggering variety of editions, sound recordings, and filmic treatments. For example, Barbra Streisand’s 1983 film Yentl was based on his story “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy.” (Singer apparently didn't like the movie.)

The Collected Stories make up a thick and rich collection —- we won’t read the entire book for class, though I encourage you to read it all eventually. Singer does reflect elements of everyday Jewish life in Poland in the early 20th century (depicted in greater, and more realistic detail, in the largely autobiographical collection Stories from My Father’s Court), but he adds a lagre dose of fantasy and heterodox folk elements. Some critics have argued that Singer’s choice to continue writing in Yiddish rather than Hebrew, say, allowed him to maintain a focus on religion and tradition that could not have been achieved in Hebrew-language literature published in Israel. Others, especially his emigrant peers in the US, have objected to Singer’s work on many grounds, especially his stories’ erotic elements and the negative elements of the individuals or communities he depicts. Cynthia Ozick’s novel Envy fictionalizes Singer’s controversial career.

Course book: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by a number of people.

Questions for reading:

A cursory search of Tripod turned up 82 listings for I. B. Singer, so this reader thinks it best that you search for other works by him yourself if necessary. You may be interested in comparing Singer’s tales about Jewish life in Poland to his later works set in the United States.

Works about Singer:

World Wide Web links about Singer:

http://almaz.com/nobel/literature/1978a.html
Nobel Prize Internet Archive
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ibsinger.htm
brief biography, list of works, etc.
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1978/
the Nobel Prize site
http://dir.salon.com/books/int/1998/04/cov_si_28int.html
“The Salon Interview”
You might enjoy comparing Singer’s writing to S. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Joachim Neugroschel's The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A HauntedReader, or Isaac Babel You Must Know Everything or Benya Krik, the Ganster, and Other Stories. A wonderful book, Magdalena Zaborowska How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives, offers readings of several female Polish and Polish Jewish immigrants to the US, any of which would likewise make a very interesting comparison to Singer. For interestingly comparable information about Yiddish poetry in America, see Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets.