Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writings on Yiddish

From the late 1950s, as Isaac Bashevis Singer became a major figure in American letters— one of the first Yiddish authors to do so— the future Nobel Laureate thought deeply about the fate of Yiddish culture in posterity. In this provocative series of essays, he advocates for Yiddish as a unique symbol of spiritual power in the face of adversity, a symbol forged during centuries of Jewish exile. Diaspora assimilation may continue apace, while a Hebrew-speaking homeland grows in population, and yet Yiddish remains inseparable from Jewishness— because, Singer writes, “ what Yiddish has created can never be lost.” In a lucid translation by David Stromberg, who also provides thoughtful introductions to each piece, Singer’ s prose is captured in all its persuasive verve and precision. From his central theme of Yiddish as the animating pulse of Jewish life, Singer shines a light on the gravest threats to wider civilized society. A fiery love letter to Yiddish, alive with psychological nuance and startling insight, this volume confirms Singer as not only a profound philosopher of human nature, but a social critic for the ages.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American author of novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and stories for children. His career spanned nearly seven decades of literary production, much of it spent translating his own work from Yiddish into English, which he undertook with various collaborators and editors. Singer published widely during his lifetime, with nearly sixty stories appearing in The New Yorker, and received numerous awards and prizes, including two Newbery Honor Book Awards (1968 and 1969), two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974), and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1978). Known for fiction that portrayed 19th-century Polish Jewry as well as supernatural tales that combined Jewish mysticism with demonology, Singer was a master storyteller whose sights were set squarely on the tension between human nature and the human spirit.

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar. His work has appeared in Salmagundi, The American Scholar, and Woven Tale Press, among others. In his role as editor of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust he has published Old Truths and New Clichés (Princeton University Press), a collection of Singer’s essays, and a new translation of the canonical story Simple Gimpl: The Definitive Bilingual Edition (Restless Books).

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Isaac Bashevis Singer: Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt A Final Reckoning, 1956-1973

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