While Poland has been home to a diverse culture throughout its history, a part of this heritage was almost wiped out, leaving very few remnants of a large portion of Polish culture in the country today. Isaac Bashevis Singer provides people with the opportunity to experience this time in Polish history in his extensive library of writing.

The Nobel Prize winning author was born on July 24, 1904 in the Polish city of Radzymin. The younger son of a Hasidic rabbi, Singer was raised in a very religious household. At the age of three, he moved to the Polish capital of Warsaw.

At the age of 16, Singer attended the Tachkemoni Rabbinical School for two years, where he studied to be a religious scholar. This was a career his parents wished for him, but Singer left the school when he got the opportunity to work for a Yiddish magazine called Literary Letter. He first worked with his older brother Isaac Joshua Singer, whose work in journalism acted as a major influence in Isaac Bashevis’s career.

Singer made his foray into the world literature as an author with the publication of Satan of Goray, released in 1932. His first story was set in medieval Poland, a time period he would return to in later works. Singer often set his work in earlier times than his own because he liked to address existential issues in his story, and the use of an earlier time in folk tales was a very effective way to do so. Along with his brother, Singer moved to the United States due to the rising level of anti-Semitism in Europe, a product of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Once in America, he went to work for The Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper geared towards immigrant Yiddish speakers.

It was during the 1940s that he began to distinguish himself in his new home as a writer with his work in The Jewish Daily Forward, as well as other journals published in New York. His continued use of Yiddish for his stories made him very popular among readers looking to experience the nearly extinguished language, which barely existed following the devastation of the Holocaust.

In 1950, Singer published The Family Moskat, his first full novel. Following up on his popular first book, he focused his energy on short story writing, with his most famous of the time being Gimpel the Fool, released in 1957. Singer gained a significant following in the United States, one reason being that he was one of few who wrote in Yiddish and the other being that his novels brought people back to a time in Poland before the destruction of the World Wars. Yiddish is a language of Germanic origins that uses the Hebrew alphabet and originated in the 1100s in the Ashkenazi Jews, a group that lived in eastern and central Europe. Although the language was widespread in Europe, it was nearly destroyed during the Holocaust.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Singer continued to write, publishing novels such as The Penitent and Shosha. He also put out more collections of short stories, the most famous being Friend of Kafka and In My Father’s Court. In 1978, Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his extensive work and the importance of his work to the preservation of the Yiddish language. Isaac Bashevis Singer died on July 24, 1991 at the age of 87.

Read more about Isaac Bashevis Singer here:
www.psb.org , www.kirjasto.sci.fi , www.nobelprize.org