Isaac Bashevis Singer (; November 11, 1903 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator in the United States. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).

Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1903 to a Jewish family in Leoncin village near Warsaw, Poland. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most sources say it was probably November 11, a date similar to the one that Singer gave to his official biographer Paul Kresh, his secretary Dvorah Telushkin, and Rabbi William Berkowitz. Some sources mention 1902. The year 1903 is consistent with the historical events that his brother refers to in their childhood memoirs, including the death of Theodor Herzl. The often-quoted birth date, July 14, 1904, was made up by the author in his youth, possibly to make himself younger to avoid the draft.

His father Pinchus-Mendel Zinger (1868–?) was a Hasidic rabbi from Tomaszów Lubelski (Lublin Governorate), and his mother, Szewa (née Zilberman, 1871–?) was from (Vladimir-Volynsky Uyezd, Volhynia Governorate); parents registered their marriage on June 2 (14) 1889 in Biłgoraj.Marriage Record in Polish State Archives (in Russian Language): Father's parents are listed as Tomaszów dwellers Shmul Zinger and Tema Sheyner; mother's parents as Poritsk dwellers Yakov-Mordka Zilberman and Chana Danziger. Singer later used his first name in an initial literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded.Several of his professional identification cards using localized spellings and further variants of these names are reproduced in: Both his older siblings, sister Esther Kreitman (1891–1954) and brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), became novelists as well, and his younger brother Moshe Singer became a rabbi. Esther was the first of the family to write stories.

The family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva. After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the family moved to Warsaw, a flat at Krochmalna Street 10. In the spring of 1914, the Singers moved to No. 12.

The street where Singer grew up was located in the impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter of Warsaw. There his father served as a rabbi, and was called on to be a judge, arbitrator, religious authority and spiritual leader in the Jewish community. The unique atmosphere of pre-war Krochmalna Street can be found both in the collection of Varshavsky-stories, which tell stories from Singer's childhood,Best known: My Father's Court 1966 as well as in those novels and stories which take place in pre-war Warsaw.Die familye Mushkat/The Family Moskat 1950, Shoym 1967/Scum 1991, etc.

World War I In 1917, because of the hardships of World War I, the family split up. Singer moved with his mother and younger brother Moshe to Biłgoraj, a traditional shtetl, where his mother's brothers had followed his grandfather as rabbis. When his father became a village rabbi again in 1921, Singer returned to Warsaw. He entered the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary and soon decided that neither the school nor the profession suited him. He returned to Biłgoraj, where he tried to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons, but soon gave up and joined his parents, considering himself a failure. In 1923, his older brother Israel Joshua arranged for him to move to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the Jewish magazine Literarishe Bleter, of which the brother was an editor.

United States In 1935, four years before the Nazi invasion, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States. He was fearful of the growing threat in neighboring Germany.. The move separated the author from his common-law first wife Runia Pontsch and son Israel Zamir (1929–2014); they immigrated to Moscow and then Palestine. The three met again in 1955.

Singer settled in New York City, where he took up work as a journalist and columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward (), a Yiddish-language newspaper. (When he arrived in the US, he only knew three words of English: "Take a chair".) After a promising start, he became despondent and for some years felt Lost in America (title of his 1974 memoir published in Yiddish; published in English in 1981).

In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann (née Haimann) (1907–1996), a German-Jewish refugee from Munich. They married in 1940, and their union seemed to release energy in him; he returned to prolific writing and to contributing to the Forward. In addition to his pen name of "Bashevis", he published under the pen names of "Warszawski" (pron. Varshavsky) during World War II, and "D. Segal".See both bibliographies (given on this page). They lived for many years in the Belnord apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side.. He became a US citizen in 1943.

In 1981, Singer delivered a commencement address at the University at Albany and was presented with an honorary doctorate..

A resident of Surfside, Florida, Singer died on July 24, 1991, after suffering a series of strokes.. He was buried in Cedar Park Cemetery, Paramus, New Jersey.. 95th Street in Surfside is named Isaac Singer Boulevard in his honor.Surfside's History: Celebrating 90 Years, Surfside, Florida, October 19, 2023. Accessed July 21, 2025. "Some of the Town’s most infamous guests and residents include organized crime figures like Tony Accardo and Sam Tucker, as well as famed author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Surfside’s 95th Street is co-named Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard in honor of the great Yiddish poet and short-story author."

Literary career Singer's first published story "Oyf der elter" ("In Old Age", 1925) won the literary competition of the Literarishe Bleter, where he worked as a proofreader."Singer, Isaac Bashevis", by Joseph Sherman, YIVO Encyclopedia A reflection of his formative years in "the kitchen of literature" can be found in many of his later works. In 1933, Singer published his first novel, Satan in Goray, in installments in the literary magazine Globus, which he had co-founded with his lifelong friend, the Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin. It is set in the years following 1648, when the Chmielnicki massacres, considered one of the greatest Jewish catastrophes, occurred. The story describes the Jewish messianic cult that arose in the village of Goraj. It explores the effects of the faraway false messiah, Shabbatai Zvi, on the local population. Its last chapter imitates the style of a medieval Yiddish chronicle. With a stark depiction of innocence crushed by circumstance, the novel appears to foreshadow coming danger. In his later work The Slave (1962), Singer returns to the aftermath of 1648 in a love story between a Jewish man and a gentile woman. He portrays the traumatized and desperate survivors of the historic catastrophe with even deeper understanding.

The Family Moskat Singer became a literary contributor to The Jewish Daily Forward only after his older brother Israel died in 1944. That year, Singer published The Family Moskat in his brother's honor. His own style showed in the daring turns of his action and characters, with double adultery during the holiest of nights of Judaism, the evening of Yom Kippur (despite being printed in a Jewish family newspaper in 1945). He was nearly forced to stop writing the novel by his editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, but was saved by readers who wanted the story to continue. After this, his stories—which he had published in Yiddish literary newspapers before—were printed in the Forward as well. Throughout the 1940s, Singer's reputation grew.

Language and themes Singer always wrote and published in Yiddish. His novels were serialized in newspapers, which also published his short stories. He edited his novels and stories for publication in English, which was used as the basis for translation into other languages. Some of Singer's stories and novels have not been translated.

Singer believed in the power of his native language and thought that there was still a large audience, including in New York, who longed to read in Yiddish. In an interview in Encounter (February 1979), he said that although the Jews of Poland had died, "something—call it spirit or whatever—is still somewhere in the universe. This is a mystical kind of feeling, but I feel there is truth in it."

Some of his colleagues and readers were shocked by the breadth and frankness of his treatment of human nature. He wrote about lesbian desire in "Zeitl and Rickel" ("Tseytl un Rikl"), published in The Seance and Other Stories; a young woman who disguises herself as a man to study Talmud in "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy", published in Short Friday; and rabbis corrupted by demons in "Zeidlus the Pope", also published in Short Friday. In novels and stories that refer to events in his own life, he portrays himself unflatteringly, with some degree of accuracy, as an artist who is self-centered yet has a keen eye for the sufferings and tribulations of others.

Literary influences

Singer had many literary influences. Besides the religious texts he studied, he grew up with a rich array of Jewish folktales and worldly Yiddish detective-stories about Max Spitzkopf and his assistant Fuchs by Jonas Kreppel. He read Russian, including Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment at the age of fourteen. He wrote in memoirs about the importance of the Yiddish translations donated in book-crates from America, which he studied as a teenager in Bilgoraj: "I read everything: Stories, novels, plays, essays... I read Rajsen, Strindberg, Don Kaplanowitsch, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Maupassant and Chekhov." He studied the philosophers Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Otto Weininger. Among his Yiddish contemporaries, Singer considered his elder brother to be his greatest artistic example. He was also a life-long friend and admirer of the author and poet Aaron Zeitlin.

His short stories, which some critics feel contain his most lasting contributions, were influenced by Anton Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant. From Maupassant, Singer developed a finely grained sense of drama. Like those of the French master, Singer's stories can pack enormous visceral excitement in the space of a few pages. From Chekhov, Singer developed his ability to draw characters of enormous complexity and dignity in the briefest of spaces. In the foreword to his personally selected volume of his finest short stories, Singer describes Chekhov, Maupassant, and "the sublime scribe of the Joseph story in the Book of Genesis" as the masters of the short story form.