Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער; Leoncin or Radzymin, according to some sources, Kingdom of Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, c. November 11, 1903- Miami, Florida, July 24, 1991) was a Jewish writer, and a Polish citizen. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Biography

Singer gave July 14, 1904 as his date of birth as a young man, possibly to avoid military service. Therefore, in 2004 the centenary of his birth was celebrated. However, it is most likely that his actual date of birth was November 11, 1903.

Singer was the son and grandson of rabbis and the brother of novelists Israel Yehoshua Singer and Esther Kreitman. He grew up in Warsaw's Jewish quarter —surrounded by a recurring scene of anti-Semitic violence in the form of pogroms— where Yiddish was spoken. Singer also spent several years in Biłgoraj, a town steeped in Jewish tradition, where his maternal grandfather was a rabbi. He received a traditional Jewish education and studied Biblical texts in Hebrew and Aramaic. Everyone in his family told stories about him and he himself began to make up his own stories when he was young.

In 1908 the family moved to Warsaw, on Krochmalna Street, where he became friends with a young woman named Shosha, who awoke his tenderness. In the meantime she read a lot, studied languages and the Talmud. When the First World War broke out, her family once again took refuge in her mother's town. His brother Israel Yehoshua went to kyiv, married, and began working for various newspapers as a proofreader and author.

In 1920 he entered the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary, but soon returned to Bilgoray, where he continued to teach Hebrew. In 1923 he moved to Warsaw, where he worked as a proofreader for the magazine Literarische Bleter , published by his brother Israel upon his return. Isaac translated into Yiddish works by Knut Hamsun, Gabriele D'Annunzio (the novel The Pleasure, in 1929), the Danish Karin Michaelis and Stefan Zweig, as well as Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque, and he became friends with Aaron Zeitlin and other young writers.

In 1929 his father, who had moved to Stary Dzików, died and Isaac helped his brother in the historical research of the novel Yoshe Kalb. In those years he had a relationship with Runia Shapira, from whom his son Israel was born. In 1932 his brother settled in New York.

From 1933 to 1935 Isaac was co-editor of the magazine Globus, where he published short stories and the serialized novel Satan in Goray (January to September 1933). It is a novel written in the medieval style of Yiddish chronicles. The story begins from the events of the 17th century that relate to the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and offers a picture of the messianic fever that spread among the Jews in those years. In a later work, The Slave (1962), he returned to the 17th century, with a story of love between a Jew and a Gentile, whose relationship is tormented by their different traditions.

In 1935 Singer joined the staff of the Jewish Daily Forward as a foreign correspondent. Fearing the Nazi offensive, to escape the anti-Semitic threat he emigrated to the United States, separated from his wife, who became a communist, and from his son, who will go to Moscow and later to Palestine.. After a difficult journey through Germany and a stay in Paris, Singer finally settled in New York, where he worked for the Jewish Daily Forward under different pseudonyms. He published the novel Der zindiker Meskiekh , The Fisherman Messiah , in installments over 5 months. The novel was not translated into English but the theme is similar to Satan in Goray, this time telling the story of Sabbatai Zevi's successor in the XVIII, which was Jacob Frank.

In 1940, he married Alma Haimann (married and divorced Wassermann), a German immigrant who worked in a prestigious clothing store, with whom he lived until his death. She already had two children and did not speak Yiddish. Isaac received the news that his first wife Runia, denounced as a Zionist, was expelled from the USSR and was in Turkey, with the intention of moving to Tel Aviv.

In those years the first translations of his stories began to appear, when Isaac had the opportunity to rewrite entire parts and received the help of various friends and relatives (a habit he would maintain throughout his life, even when he spoke perfect English and could have avoided it).

In 1943 he became a US citizen. The following year his brother Israel died of a heart attack. His mother and his other brother Misha were deported to Kazakhstan during the Russian occupation of Poland, where they died. Her only sister, Hinde Esther, married Kreitman, also a writer, lived in Antwerp (she saw her only once in England in 1947, where she died in 1954). As for his son Israel, she would like to adopt him but Runia refused.

In 1945, after the war, he began serializing in the daily The Moskat Family (from November 1945 to May 1948). The novel was also read on the radio, and met with some success in the New York Jewish community. It was published, with cuts and variations, in English in 1950 (officially translated by Abraham and Nancy Gross). His first collection of short stories in English, Gimpel the Fool, was published in 1957; the title story of the collection was translated into English by Saul Bellow. Some of the stories that were published in the Daily Forward were later collected in the works At my father's court (1966) and New stories from the court from my father (2000). In these memoirs of family life, Singer's father appears devout and composed as he studies the Talmud; her mother as a practical woman who wants her husband to pay more attention to money and daily problems.

He began wintering in Florida and traveling (visiting Europe in 1947 and Cuba in 1951, Israel and France in 1969) and became well known in the English-speaking world. In 1954, the critic Irving Howe included two of his stories in a collection of Yiddish stories. Collections of short stories and novels followed one another regularly, and translations into other languages also began to appear (initially in French and Spanish, later in Italian). In 1955 his son Israel visited him in New York, on a trip organized by his kibbutz.

With appointment to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964, Singer became the only American member to write in a language other than English. "Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the language of a frightened and hopeful humanity." In the mid-sixties he became a strong supporter of vegetarianism.

Singer published 18 novels, 14 children's books, numerous essays, articles, and reviews, but in the United States he is known primarily as a short story writer (The three-volume edition of his collected short stories in the "Library of America" collects 184 of them).

The Magician of Lublin (1960), translated into several languages, tells of a lustful magician and his transformation towards atonement for self-reclusion. With Shosha (1978), she narrates a love story in Poland in the thirties, renarrating the Krochmalna street where she grew up. Among the collections of stories we must also remember A friend of Kafka's (1970), The death of Methuselah and other stories (1988). Among the autobiographical stories and novels: In my father's court (1966) and Love and Exile (1984).

Singer's is a realistic narrative interwoven with the historical and social dynamics that are vividly evoked. Singer pays attention to the plot and the inner world of the characters, highlighting the tribulations and weaknesses, their desire for glory and their need for love, the problem of identity in the struggle between a traditional value system and the inexorable process of secularization. and the assimilation of Jews into the dominant culture. As a writer he considers his role uninfluential: "Writers can stimulate the mind, but they can't direct it." Time changes things, God changes things, dictators change things, but writers can't change anything.

For the last fourteen years of his life, he was assisted by Dvora Telushkin, whom he met in 1975, when he was twenty-one. Telushkin talks about his transition from secretary to translator in his book Master of dreams (1997). He died on July 24, 1991.

Other key works about him are: The Wizard of 86th Street by Paul Kresh (1979), Conversations edited by Richard Burgin (1986) and the film Isaac in America by Amrak Nowak (1986).

In addition to the Nobel, he was awarded the National Book Award in 1973.

Points of view and opinions

Judaism

Singer's relationship with Judaism was complex and unconventional. He identified as skeptical and reclusive, though he felt a connection to his orthodox roots. Eventually, he developed a view of religion and philosophy that he termed "private mysticism." In his own words: "Since God was completely unknown and eternally silent, he could be endowed with whatever trait one chose to attribute to him."

Singer was raised Orthodox and learned all the Jewish prayers, studied Hebrew, and learned the Torah and Talmud. As he recounted in the autobiographical story & # 34; In my father's court & # 34;, he separated from his parents at the age of twenty. Influenced by his older sister, who had done the same, he began spending time with non-religious bohemian artists in Warsaw. Although Singer believed in one God, as in traditional Judaism, he stopped attending Jewish religious services of any kind, even on High Holidays. He struggled all his life with the feeling that a kind and compassionate God would never support the great suffering he saw all around him, especially the death in the Holocaust of so many Polish Jews from his childhood. In an interview with photographer Richard Kaplan, he said: "I'm angry with God for what happened to my brothers": Singer's older brother died suddenly in February 1944, in New York, of a thrombosis; His younger brother perished in Soviet Russia around 1945, after being deported with his mother and his wife to southern Kazakhstan in Stalin's purges.

Despite the complexities of his religious understanding, Singer lived in the midst of the Jewish community throughout his life. He didn't seem comfortable if he wasn't around Jews, especially Jews born in Europe. Although he was fluent in English, Hebrew and Polish, he always considered Yiddish his natural language. He always wrote in Yiddish and was the last notable American author to write in this language. After achieving success as a writer in New York, Singer and his wife began spending their winters in Miami with their Jewish community, many of them New Yorkers.

Over time, already old, they moved to Miami. They closely identified with the Jewish Ashkenazi. Following his death, Singer was buried in a traditional Jewish ceremony in a Jewish cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey.

Vegetarianism

Singer was a noted vegetarian for the last 35 years of his life, often including vegetarian themes in his work. In his last story, The Slaughterer ( El matarife ), he described the anguish of a designated slaughterer trying to reconcile his compassion for animals with his task of kill them He considered that the ingestion of meat is a negation of all ideals and all religions: "How can we speak of law and justice if we take an innocent creature and its blood is shed?". When asked if he had become a vegetarian for health reasons, he replied: "I didn't do it for my health, but for the health of the chickens."

In The Letter Writer, he wrote: "When it comes to animals, all people are Nazis; for animals, this is an eternal Treblinka".

In the foreword to Steven Rosen's Food for Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions (1986), Singer wrote: "When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. The man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why then should man expect God's mercy? It is unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. It's incoherent. I will never be able to accept inconsistency or injustice. Even if it's about God. If a voice came from God saying: "I am against vegetarianism!" I would say: "Well, I am in favor of it!" That is how I strongly feel in this regard."

Work

In general, the Spanish versions have been translated from English and not from their original language. The date that appears is that of its publication in Yiddish.

• Satan in Goray (1935)
• The Moskat family (1950)
• The magician of Lublin (1960)
• Shadows about the Hudson (1957-58).
• The slave (1962) Plaza & Janes editors
• In my father's court (1966)
• The house of Jampol (1967). Editorial Debate, 2003.
• The certificate (1967). Editions B, 2004.
• The Golem (1968). Jewish Daily Forward. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982.
• The heirs (1969). Editorial Debate, 2003.
• Enemies, a love story (1972). Edited by Janes Square, 1983.
• A pleasant day: stories of a child raised in Warsaw (1973)
• The penitent (1973) Plaza & Janes, 1984.
• Shosha (1978) Plaza & Janes editors
• Escoria Planet (1991), 1991.
• Meshugah (1994)
• Krochmalna N° 10'
• Love and exile (1984). Editions B, 2002.
• The Destruction of Kreshev (2007). Acantied. (Translation: Rhoda Henelde and Jacob Abecassis).
• The Advent Emperor of China (Conaculta, 2011)

The following is the title of the English translation of other of his works (not translated into Spanish). Some of these translations were made by Singer himself. The date that appears is that of the publication in English.

• The Fearsome Inn (1967)
• Mazel and Shlimazel (1967)
• The Manor (1967)
• Elijah The Slave (1970)
• Joseph and Koza: or the Sacrifice to the Vistula (1970)
• Enemies, Love Story (1972)
• The Wicked City (1972)
• The Hasidim (1973)
• Fools of Chelm (1975)
• Naftali and the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus (1976)
• A Young Man in Search of Love (1978)
• The Penitent (1983)
• Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1983)
• Why Noah Chose the Dove (1984)
• The King of the Fields (1988)
• Scum (1991)

Adult Tales

• The Spinoza of Market Street.
• Gimpel the fool and other stories (1957). Editorial Plaza and Janés, 1979.
• A wedding in Brownsville, Editorial Bruguera, 1983.
• The image and other stories, Editorial Ada Korn, 1987.
• A friend of Kafka, Editorial Planeta, 1973.
• A friend of Kafka and other stories, Editorial Cátedra, 1990.
• The Death of Matusalén, The other shore, 2007

Tales for children and young people

• ”Jewish stories” Editorial Anaya 1989
• When Schlemel went to Warsaw and other stories, Editorial Alfaguara, 1992
• Jewish tales of the village of Chelm, Editorial Lumen, 1996
• Children's Tales, Editorial Anaya, 2004
• Tales of love and hope'