Long Fiction:
Der Sotn in Gorey, 1935 (Satan in Goray, 1955)
Di Familye Mushkat, 1950 (The Family Moskat, 1950)
Der Hoyf, 1953–1955 (The Manor, 1967, and The Estate, 1969)
Shotns baym Hodson, 1957–1958 (Shadows on the Hudson, 1998)
Der Kuntsnmakher fun Lublin, 1958–1959 (The Magician of Lublin, 1960)
Der Knekht, 1961 (The Slave, 1962)
Sonim, de Geshichte fun a Liebe, 1966 (Enemies: A Love Story, 1972)
Neshome Ekspeditsyes, 1974 (Shosha, 1978)
Der Bal-Tshuve, 1974 (The Penitent, 1983)
Reaches of Heaven: A Story of the Baal Shem Tov, 1980
Der Kenig vun di Felder, 1988 (The King of the Fields, 1988)
Scum, 1991
The Certificate, 1992
Meshugah, 1994
Short Fiction:
Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories, 1957
The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961
Short Friday, and Other Stories, 1964
The Séance, and Other Stories, 1968
A Friend of Kafka, and Other Stories, 1970
A Crown of Feathers, and Other Stories, 1973
Passions, and Other Stories, 1975
Old Love, 1979
The Collected Stories, 1982
The Image, and Other Stories, 1985
The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, 1988
Drama:
The Mirror, pr. 1973
Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, pr. 1974 (with Leah Napolin)
Shlemiel the First, pr. 1974
Teibele and Her Demon, pr. 1978
Nonfiction:
Mayn Tatn’s Bes-din Shtub, 1956 (In My Father’s Court, 1966)
The Hasidim, 1973 (with Ira Moskowitz)
A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light, 1976
A Young Man in Search of Love, 1978
Isaac Bashevis Singer on Literature and Life, 1979 (with Paul Rosenblatt and Gene Koppel)
Lost in America, 1980
Love and Exile, 1984
Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1985 (with Richard Burgin)
More Stories from My Father’s Court, 2000
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Zlateh the Goat, and Other Stories, 1966
The Fearsome Inn, 1967
Mazel and Shlimazel: Or, The Milk of a Lioness, 1967
When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw, and Other Stories, 1968
A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, 1969
Elijah the Slave, 1970
Joseph and Koza: Or, The Sacrifice to the Vistula, 1970
Alone in the Wild Forest, 1971
The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China, 1971
The Wicked City, 1972
The Fools of Chelm and Their History, 1973
Why Noah Chose the Dove, 1974
A Tale of Three Wishes, 1975
Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and Other Stories, 1976
The Power of Light: Eight Stories, 1980
The Golem, 1982
Stories for Children, 1984
Translations:
Romain Rolland, 1927 (of Stefan Zweig)
Die Volger, 1928 (of Knut Hamsun)
Victoria, 1929 (of Hamsun)
All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930 (of Erich Remarque)
Pan, 1931 (of Hamsun)
The Way Back, 1931 (of Remarque)
The Magic Mountain, 1932 (of Thomas Mann)
From Moscow to Jerusalem, 1938 (of Leon Glaser)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish writer who transcended his ethnic category, skillfully employs modernist fictional techniques to pose questions about human beings, God, and existence. In his writing Singer reveals the conflicting elements of his upbringing. His father, Pinchas Mendel Singer, was a Hasidic rabbi who told his son stories of demons and spirits. His mother, Bathsheba Zylberman Singer, whose first name he eventually adopted in its Yiddish form, was on the contrary a rationalist who talked of their Biłgoraj relatives. This difference in temperament between his parents is evident in “Why the Geese Shrieked,” one of the tales in A Day of Pleasure. When a woman brings two dead geese to Rabbi Singer because they have continued to make strange noises, he seeks a supernatural explanation; his wife remarks that the sound is merely air passing through the severed windpipe and that if the woman removes the windpipe, the shrieking will cease, as indeed it does.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Singer’s two older siblings also influenced him. His sister Hende Esther, thirteen years his senior, enjoyed telling him love stories. Most important to his literary growth was his brother, Israel Joshua Singer, who also became an important author; for many years Singer was better known as Israel’s brother than as a writer himself. When Singer was four, the family moved to 10 Krochmalna Street, Warsaw, which serves as the setting for Shosha and some of Singer’s best short fiction. In 1917 he and his mother left the Polish capital for Biłgoraj to escape the hunger and disease caused by World War I. During the four years he remained in the hamlet, he observed the rural Jewish life that later played so large a role in his writing.
After a brief attempt at rabbinical training at the Tachkemoni Seminary, Warsaw (1921-1922), he returned to Biłgoraj, then went to Dzikow, where his father was serving as rabbi. In this village he found the Hasidic tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav. One may regard Singer’s fiction as the inverse of Rabbi Nachman’s: Both are haunted by the supernatural, but while Rabbi Nachman’s always have a happy ending directed by God, Singer’s reveal a more ambivalent attitude toward Divine Providence.
In 1923 Singer’s literary career began when his brother invited him to become proofreader for the Yiddish magazine he was coediting in Warsaw, Literarische Bletter. To supplement his income, Singer also translated popular works into Yiddish, and he began to write himself, publishing his first story in 1925 in his brother’s periodical. When Israel Joshua left for America, Singer worked for a time as associate editor of Globus magazine. In 1935, convinced that Nazism posed real dangers, he followed his brother to New York, where he began his long and fruitful association with the Jewish Daily Forward.
Singer’s first significant recognition in the United States came in 1950, with the English-language publication of The Family Moskat, a family saga modeled on his brother’s work. Saul Bellow’s translation of “Gimpl Tam” as “Gimpel the Fool” in the Partisan Review three years later added to a reputation that has continued to grow. Singer went on to win Newbery Awards for his children’s stories (which he did not begin writing until he was sixty-two years old), National Book Awards, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.
In presenting the Nobel Prize to Singer, Lars Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy remarked that in his works “the Middle Ages seem to spring to life again, . . . the daily round is interwoven with wonders, reality is spun from dreams, the blood of the past pulsates in the present.” Seven of Singer’s novels and most of his successful short stories are set in the vanished world of Eastern European Jewry, a world he neither sentimentalizes nor romanticizes. His chief critics have been Yiddishists who see him as pessimistic and irreligious, but Singer countered that he is merely realistic: Not all Polish Jews were honest, God-fearing, and chaste, and tragedy was their lot at least as often as comedy. Singer mingles his mother’s rationalism with the surrealistic realm of demons, dybbuks, and other supernatural beings that he had learned from his father and through whom he explores the unfathomable nature of the universe.
One of the reasons Singer has given for his delight in writing for children is that young readers want a good story, not a message. His writing instead highlights the unfathomable nature of the world. How can the existentially isolated individual survive? How should he live? How can he relate to the rest of suffering humanity? “If God is wisdom,” Haiml Chentshiner asks in Shosha, “how can there be foolishness? And if God is life, how can there be death?” Cybula in The King of the Fields wonders why any creature must suffer. As puzzling as these questions are, they must be faced. Characters such as Jacob and Wanda/Sarah (The Slave) or Gimpel the Fool are saved because they are willing to believe in a Providence they cannot see. Recognizing their estrangement from God, the source of wisdom, they still reveal a sense of compassion for his creation, a compassion that ultimately redeems all foolishness. Whether set in upper West Side Manhattan or primitive Poland, Singer’s fiction portrays the ongoing struggle between the forces of good and evil, between humankind’s highest aspirations and deepest sensuality.