The Spinoza of Market Street (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978 Nobel Prize laureate, is internationally acclaimed for his short stories and novels, written in Yiddish, but known to readers mostly in translation. He is also a prolific essayist, children’s book writer, playwright, journalist, editor, translator and memoirist. Singer was born July 14,1904, into a Chassidic Jewish family, in Radzymin (or Leoncin), Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. The exact date of his birth is not clear, and has been listed as either July 14, October 26, or November 21. Singer’s father and both of his grandfathers were Hassidic rabbis.

In 1908, when Singer was four, the family moved to nearby Warsaw, where he spent most of his childhood. In 1914, Singer read his first non-religious text, Crime and Punishment, by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevski. From 1917 to 1921, he and his mother lived with relatives in the rural shtetl of Bilgory, before returning to Warsaw.

He was enrolled in the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary in 1921, according to the wishes of his parents, but eventually left to pursue a career in writing. From 1923 to 1933, Singer worked as a proofreader and translator for a journal where his elder brother Israel Joshua worked, and as an associate editor of a different journal from 1933-1935. His first short story was published in 1927. In Warsaw, Singer lived with a woman named Runya (or Runia), by whom he had an illegitimate son, Israel Zamir, in 1929.

In 1935, Singer immigrated to the United States, joining his elder brother, Israel Joshua, already an established Yiddish fiction writer. Singer lived in relative poverty in Brooklyn, while working for the renowned Yiddish newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward.His fiction was serialized in The Jewish Daily Forward throughout the 1940s. Singer remained a staff writer for the Daily Forward until his death.

In 1940, he married Alma Hazmann (or Haimann), a German-Jewish immigrant, and in 1943 became an American citizen. His brother Israel Joshua died the following year. Singer’s first novel to be translated into English, The Family Moskat, was published in 1950. An important turning point in his career was the publication of his short story “Gimpel the Fool,” in an English translation by writer Saul Bellow, in 1953. This was the first high profile introduction of Singer’s work to English readers.

Singer’s international reputation as the leading Yiddish fiction writer of the century grew steadily throughout the 1950s, as more and more of his works were translated into English and other languages. He won the 1970 National Book Award for children’s literature, for A Day of Pleasure, and the 1974 National Book Award for fiction for A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories.He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.

In later years, he and Alma lived in New York and in Florida. He died after a series of strokes, on July 24, 1991, in Surfside, Florida, and was buried in Beth-El Cemetery in New York. Three of his novels were published posthumously.