Isaac Bashevis Singer

Born on November 11, 1903, in the village of Leoncin, near Warsaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up in a rabbinical household, his father served as a rabbi and religious judge, and his mother was the daughter of the Rabbi of Biłgoraj. In 1908 the family moved to a flat on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, where his father held a rabbinical court that became the setting for some of Singer's most vivid memoirs. His older brother Israel Joshua, already a published writer, drew him into the literary world, arranging a job for him as a proofreader at the Yiddish magazine Literarishe Bleter in 1923. Singer wrote exclusively in Yiddish, a language he called "the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of the frightened and hopeful humanity." In 1935, four years before the Nazi invasion that would destroy the world of his childhood, he emigrated to New York. He published The Family Moskat (1950), The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Slave (1962), and Enemies, A Love Story (1972), among many other novels and hundreds of short stories, all originally composed in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward and later translated into English with the help of collaborators. He won two National Book Awards and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, delivering his acceptance speech in both Yiddish and English. He spent his final years in Surfside, Florida. He died on July 24, 1991, of several strokes, at the age of eighty-seven.

Singer wrote only in Yiddish, his stories serialized for immigrant readers whose language was already dying around them. In 1953 the novelist Saul Bellow translated one of them, Gimpel the Fool, for Partisan Review. Readers outside that vanishing world met Isaac Bashevis Singer for the first time, in English, through another writer's hand, and his American career began.