Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Noble Prize for Literature, was one of the most admired and influential Jewish writers of the twentieth century, as well as a key figure in the history of literature written in Yiddish, the language in which he published throughout his career. He was born in 1903 into an orthodox Jewish household in the village of Leoncin, Poland, just outside Warsaw, the city where the family moved a few years later. Descended from a long line of rabbis, including his father, Singer initially aspired to become one himself, but ultimately decided his calling lay elsewhere. During his twenties, he transitioned to a secular lifestyle and immersed himself in literary pursuits, writing and publishing his first short stories, as well as working as an editor and translator. By 1935, anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe had so intensified, especially with the rise to power of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany, that Singer decided to emigrate to New York City, just after the publication of his debut novel Satan in Goray. Once in the United States, he continued to write, but it was not until his fiction started to appear in English translations in the 1950s that he achieved widespread recognition. Soon thereafter, he became internationally revered for his witty and poignant renderings of the pre-World War II lives of Jews in Eastern Europe and his ability to make the part of the world he knew so well feel universal to a global audience. “Gimpel the Fool” remains one of his most famous stories. Although Singer lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for most of his adult life and became a fluent speaker of English, he continued to publish almost entirely in Yiddish and made the celebration and preservation of that language the subject of his Noble Prize Lecture. In his final years, he moved with his wife, Alma, to Florida, where he died in 1991.