© Opale

Isaac Bashevis SINGER

Nobel Prize 1978

 

"For his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life"

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on the 14th of July 1904,son of a Jewish family who lived on the banks of the river Vistula. He had an older sister and brother, Hindele Esther (born in 1891) and Joshua (born in 1893) respectively, and one younger brother, Mishe, born in 1906. His mother was the daughter of a rabbi, and his father,Pinkas, was himself a rabbi,a descendant of Baal Chem Tov, the founder of Hassidism. Singer spent the majority of his childhood in Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, which was principally inhabited by Jews of a poor background. This background would inspire Th eLittle World of Krochmalna Street.

The house where Singer was raised was very modest, and the inhabitants of Krochmalna street would often come to the house to seek counsel regarding their marital and family problems. It was through resolving these conflicts that Pinkas earned money. Young Isaac would often hide himself and eavesdrop upon these stories. The work In my father’s court would emerge from these childhood memories. In the Singer household, Judaism was present throughout. The children had no toys. Sister Hindele hated the tasks reserved for women and dreamt of studying like her brothers. Singer probably drew upon the character of his sister to create the character of Yentl found in the eponymous short story. The Séance was dedicated to her memory. Hindele suffered badly with her nerves and had epilectic fits. Once an adult, she would translate Dickens and Shaw into Yiddish.

Joshua, the older brother, who was destined to become a rabbi, rebelled at an early age against his father’s faith. In 1914, he left the family home. Joshua’s rebellion troubled Isaac profoundly. Like his brother, he plunged himself into reading – Spinoza, Gogol, Dostoievsky and Tolstoy. Joshua began to write stories at a young age, and Pearls would be a great success in 1920. He would also write for the Jewish press, notably in the journal Literarische Bleter. Joshua introduced Isaac to literary circles and obtained a position for him as a proofreader in this newspaper. The two brothers frequented the Writers Club of Warsaw.

Singer began at this point to define his own belief system made up of mysticism and scepticism. In 1929 he had a liaison with Rachel Poncz. From their relationship, Israel was born. The same year, Pinkas Singer died. Now famous in the literary world of Warsaw, Joshua became the Polish correspondent for a large American newspaper, the Jewish daily Forward ( Forverts in Yiddish ) and published Yoshe the Madman in 1932. The public only knew Isaac as the brother of the writer Joshua Singer. But he had already written his first novel.

Faced with the rising tide of anti-semitism in Poland, and the arrival of Hitler in Germany, his older brother Joshua left the country, taking his wife and son and settling in New York. Inn 1935, he encouraged Isaac to come, who in turn promised Rachel to come to the United States with their son Israel, who at that point was 5 years old. This was never to be. Rachel, a communist as this point, left for the USSR with their son. Then, their journey would take them to Palestine.

Singer’s first years in the United States were difficult ones. Uprooted, he found it hard to adapt to American life. In New York Jewish parents no longer taught Yiddish to their children. But Singer refused to give up his language. His first novel published in America, was a failure. Singer continued to live thanks to his work as a proof reader at Forward, whilst continuing to publish short stories in the same newspaper. In 1937 he met and married Alma Haimann, a Jewish woman who originally came from Munich. Their marriage would last until his death. In 1944 Joshua Singer died of a heart attack. Strangely, it was only after the death of his brother that Isaac Singer began to write successful novels.

In 1943 he obtained American citizenship and published The Family Moskat. He became very productive; he would publish in the Forward 121 short stories including the famous Gimpel The Fool and Short Friday. In the following years Singer published a large number of novels, such as Shadows on the Hudson, Lost in America, The Wicked City, The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories, The Magician of Lublin among others. Singer wrote exclusively in Yiddish. In 1953 Saul Bellow translated Gimpel The Fool into English. This short story was a great success and reached a large public. The works of Singer would then translated into English. It is from their English translations that they would be retranslated into other tongues. Singer knew that translation did not aptly represent the work of an author. From the point of The Family Moskat therefore he worked alongside the translators of his work, supervising each of the translations into English.

In his novels and his short stories Singer does not speak directly about the Shoah. He portrays the small Jewish-Polish world of his youth that had disappeared. Equally he tells the story of the difficulties faced by Jews emigrating to the United States. He does not hesitate to recount certain moments of his life as in his most autobiographical novel, The Certificate. These books explore characters who are torn between traditional beliefs and the modern way of life. Singer describes characters who are prey to all of these passions. Some stories have a twinge of the fantastic about them with the presence of spirits and phantoms. This is the reason why Singer’s work is universal and can reach a non-Jewish public as well as a Jewish readership, memory serving as the principal source for his work. Singer refused to return to Poland even in the post-war years.
Israel, his son, now 25, would visit him in New York in 1955. Their relationship remained cold. However Israel translated Enemies, a Love Story into Hebrew from English.

Singer continued to write in Yiddish for the Forward, but his stories were translated into English in the Saturday Evening Post and the Chicago Tribune. In the 1960s he wrote stories for children – the most famous of which is Zlateh the Goat (1966)

Fame in the manner of prizes came in the 1970s : he would win the National Book Award in 1970, and in 1974 again with A Crown of Feathers. In October 1978 Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the year of the publication of Shosha and of Young Man in Search of Love. He was the first Yiddish language writer to receive this prize. At the end of his life, he weakened considerably and suffered from memory loss, a terrible affliction for someone who had made memory his principle instrument in the construction of his books.

Isaac Bashevis Singer died on the 24th of July 1991, in Miami.