Bücher von Isaac Bashevis Singer

Introduction by Marc Caplan, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Although it is unsurprising that Isaac Bashevis Singer was the only Yiddish writer chosen for a Nobel Prize in Literature-the only Yiddish writer who will ever be so honored-it is equally unsurprising that this honor has caused such enduring controversy among Yiddish readers. For these readers, Bashevis's writing has been distinguished by two characteristic transgressions. His focus on the occult, rooted with intimate detail in the folklore and demonology of Polish Jewry, calls to mind superstitions that a supposedly secular Yiddish culture had been battling for nearly two centuries. And his focus on morbid and prurient sexuality equally embarrassed a readership that had never developed a taste or even tolerance for eroticism in their "respectable" literature. In both a psychological and historical sense, he confronts readers with aspects of their own culture that they would have preferred to remain consigned to a distant past. Yet in both of these tendencies, Bashevis sought to reconsider the terms that have defined Yiddish literature since its "classic" era during the nineteenth century. Specifically, the thematic and stylistic character of Bashevis's fiction stems directly from the writing of Y.L. Peretz, the writer who most greatly influenced Yiddish culture in the interwar period, particularly in Bashevis's native Poland. Where Peretz had sought to re-purpose Yiddish folklore to promote a modern, rational, humanist ethos, Bashevis mined the same tradition to exploit its irrational, bizarre, and demonic characteristics. No less an authority than Gershom Scholem, in one of his few published remarks on Yiddish literature, credited Bashevis's writing as a significant source for understanding the debts that Jewish demonology owes to Polish folklore.[1] Where Peretz sought to introduce an image of romantic love and healthy, if modest, sexuality to modern Yiddish literature-particularly through his revival of the literary fairy tale-Bashevis used the same Polish-Jewish folklore to depict sexuality as the most primitive trick in the least accomplished demons' repertoire. Bashevis grew up with two distinguished writers, crediting his brother I.J. Singer as his greatest inspiration, particularly after his brother's early death, and mostly ignoring his older sister Esther Singer Kreitman or damning her remarkable, often painfully autobiographical stories and novels with faint praise. But it was Peretz who served symbolically as the father against whom Bashevis eternally rebelled. The stories collected in this volume date from after World War II, and therefore introduce a complex of historical and social themes that deserve their own explanation. But the best among them maintain the focus on anti-rational, even supernatural themes, as well as the perversity of male-female relationships with which Bashevis's writing had distinguished itself from the 1930s. "Yentl the Yeshiva Bokher," for example-made famous by Barbara "Barbra" Streisand's 1983 film adaptation, and notorious by Bashevis's repudiation of the movie-describes a love triangle that when read as a satire of yeshiva culture includes a graphic account of a lesbian wedding night, and when understood as a literary fairy tale focuses on a hermaphroditic protagonist that in contemporary

The Penitent tells the story of Jospeh Shapiro, his rapid climb to prosperity, his quick plunge into promiscuity, and his subsequent flight to Israel in order to find salvation.

The vanished way of life of Eastern European Jews in the early part of the twentieth century is the subject of this extraordinary novel. All the strata of this complex society were populated by powerfully individual personalities, and the whole community pulsated with life and vitality. The affairs of the patriarchal Meshulam Moskat and the unworldly Asa Heshel Bannet provide the center of the book, but its real focus is the civilization that was destroyed forever in the gas chambers of the Second World War.

David Bendiner, a young writer and secularized Jew, has qualified to emigrate from Warsaw to Palestine, but he's broke, and in order to make the journey, he must enter into a fictitious marriage with a prosperous woman eager to get there. Grappling with romantic, political and philosophical turmoil, David must also confront his faith when his father, an Orthodox rabbi, shows up in Warsaw.

Meshugah, Singer's third posthumous novel, is an impressive work which the author published serially in 1981 - 83. It concerns Holocaust survivors in New York in the early 1950s. The story is narrated by Aaron Greidinger, who finds himself inextricably invloved with a group of refugees on the Upper West Side.

"Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer"--Cover.

Twenty stories from the Nobel Prizewinner, including "Disguised," a transvestite tale of the yeshiva student whose deserted wife finds him dressed as a woman and married to a man, and the title story, which portrays Methuselah at the age of 969 -- "and when you pass your nine hundredth birthday, you are not what you used to be."

A fictional exploration of primitive history, Singer's novel portrays an age of superstition and violence in a country emerging from the darkness of savagery. Part parable of modern civilization, part fascinating historical novel, it reaffrims the author's reputation as a master storyteller.

An authentic literary great, Singer was an author whose extraordinary talents won him a worldwide audience. And with this impressive novel, he proved that he was at the height of his creative power until his recent death at age 86. Scum evokes the teeming life of 1906 Warsaw's backstreets. Max Barabander, distraught over the recent death of his son, flees the life of wealth and respectability he has attained in Buenos Aires, to return to the poverty and shadows of his youth spent in Warsaw. He fears impotence which leads him to the pursuit of mindless sex with five different women who view him only as an escape from their drab lives. The author recalls the teeming life of 1906 Jewish Warsaw in this impressive novel of changing mores and values. . .

This book of twenty stories is Isaac Bashevis Singer's fifth collection and contains such classics as "The Cafeteria" and "On the Way to the Poorhouse."

Translated by from Yiddish by Roger H. Klein and others.

The Image is a collection of twenty-two entertaining stories that range in time from the old days in Warsaw to recent years in America. The title story is haunted by a unique love that falls like a shadow between a newly married couple.

Love and Exile contains the three volumes of the Nobel Prize Winner's spiritual autobiography, covering his childhood in a rabbinical household in Poland, his young manhood in Warsaw and his beginning as a writer, and his emigration to New York before the outbreak of war, with the concomitant displacement of a Yiddish writer in a strange land.

Skurrile Geschichten von den Menschen, denen der Autor in seinem Wohnblock am East Broadway begegnet: Rabbiner und fromme Chassidim aus Polen, gestrandete Revolutionäre, Maler, Schriftsteller oder auch kleine Gauner. "Von ihnen allen berichtet Singer mit einem schelmischen Lächeln, mit halluzinierender Genauigkeit und mit einem tiefen Mitfühlen, das er auf den Leser zu übertragen weiß." NZZ

Die Autobiographie des Nobelpreisträgers. Isaac B. Singer schildert den an überraschenden Schicksalsfügungen reichen Weg aus dem polnischen Schtetl Radzymin nach Warschau, durch Nazi-Deutschland und über Paris in die Weltstadt New York. "Eine faszinierende Lektüre, prall gefüllt mit lebendiger Realität, Tempo, Witz und Skurrilität." NDR

A delightful addition to the cherished autobiographical work of the Nobel LaureateA sequel to I. B. Singer's classic memoir In My Father's Court, these stories, published serially in the Daily Forward, depict the beth din in his father's home on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. A unique institution, the beth din was a combined court of law, synagogue, scholarly institution, and psychologist's office where people sought out the advice and counsel of a neighborhood rabbi.The twenty-seven stories gathered here show this world as it appeared to a young boy. From the earthy to the ethereal, these stories provide an intimate and powerful evocation of a bygone world.