Isaac Bashevis Singer

Biography

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was born in Leoncin in the Russian Empire, now Poland, and grew up in a rabbinic family in Warsaw. Yiddish was the language of his home and later the principal language of his literary career. He briefly studied for the rabbinate before turning fully to writing, journalism and translation. Singer emigrated to the United States in 1935 and settled in New York, where he wrote for the Yiddish press and developed an international readership. His fiction frequently returned to the vanished Jewish world of pre-Holocaust Poland and explored faith, desire, folklore, modernity and assimilation. His major works include The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, The Slave, Enemies, A Love Story and the memoir In My Father's Court, alongside many short-story collections and children's books. He received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for narrative art rooted in Polish-Jewish cultural tradition.

Public links

• NobelPrize.org
• yiddishbookcenter.org