Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1978 and considered the greatest Yiddish writer of the 20th century, was a profoundly important voice in world literature, and an invaluable witness to the vanishing culture of Eastern European Jews. He was also a consummate storyteller. In Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, Janet Hadda brings her dual expertise - as a practicing psychoanalyst and a Yiddish literary scholar - to this illuminating study of Singer's life and work. Drawing on extensive interviews with his wife, his translators, and fellow writers, and using original Yiddish sources, Hadda traces Singer's remarkable trajectory from the grinding poverty of Bilgoray, Poland, to his early struggles and paralyzing self-doubts as a lonely immigrant in New York in the 1930s, and finally to his arrival at the pinnacle of literary fame. Hadda's account gives us, in the end, an enormously complicated man profoundly afflicted by the contradictions of his historical circumstance and personal suffering who was yet able to transform his burdens into a marvelously compassionate literature.