Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt The War Years, 1939-1946

by Singer, Isaac Bashevis; Stromberg, David

• ISBN13: 9798988677307
• ISBN10: 8988677307
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-11-14
• Publisher: White Goat Press

Summary

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945, is the first major effort to fill the gap between the Nobel laureate's Yiddish and English oeuvre. Knowing that a whole world, a whole way of life, a whole cultural treasure bound up with Yiddish and Yiddishkayt--that they were all going up in flames before his very eyes--was crushing for Singer, driving him to put pen to paper and write. His wartime writing--appearing in an intensely urgent tone--sought to record not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that was taking place at that very moment.

Author Biography

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American author of novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and stories for children. His career spanned nearly seven decades of literary production, much of it spent translating his own work from Yiddish into English, which he undertook with various collaborators and editors. Singer published widely during his lifetime, with nearly sixty stories appearing in The New Yorker, and received numerous awards and prizes, including two Newbery Honor Book Awards (1968 and 1969), two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974), and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1978). Known for fiction that portrayed 19th-century Polish Jewry as well as supernatural tales that combined Jewish mysticism with demonology, Singer was a master storyteller whose sights were set squarely on the tension between human nature and the human spirit.