SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS

bäshĕvˈĭs, 1904–91, American novelist and short-story writer in the Yiddish language, younger brother of I. J. Singer, b. Poland. He emigrated to the United States in 1935 and worked in New York City as a journalist on the Jewish Daily Forward. In 1943 he became an American citizen. Singer's work, often frankly sexual, draws heavily on Jewish folklore, religion, and mysticism. Though he wrote in Yiddish, he was fluent in English and closely supervised the English translations of his works. In 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Yiddish-language author to be so honored. Many of his later works treat the loneliness of old age and the sense of alienation produced in Jews by the dissolution of values through assimilation with the Gentile world. His novels include The Family Moskat (tr. 1950), Satan in Goray (tr. 1955), The Manor (tr. 1967), Enemies (tr. 1972), Shasha (tr. 1978), The Penitent (tr. 1983), Scum (tr. 1991), and the posthumously published Shadows on the Hudson (tr. 1997). Singer is also highly regarded for his imaginative, perceptive, and witty short stories. Collections include Gimpel the Fool (tr. 1961), The Spinoza of Market Street (tr. 1961), Old Love (tr. 1979), and The Death of Methuselah (tr. 1985). He also wrote books for children and several plays, notably The Mirror (tr. 1973).

See his autobiographical In My Father's Court (1966); his memoirs, A Little Boy in Search of God (1976), A Young Man in Search of Love (1978), and Lost in America (1979); biographies by P. Kresh (1979), C. Sinclair (1983), and J. Hadda (1997); studies by E. Alexander (1980), D. N. Miller (1985), and G. Farrell and B. Farrell, ed. (1996).

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