Isaac Bashevis Singer brought the vibrant milieu of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewry to the English-speaking world through his subtle psychological insight, deep sympathy for the eccentricities of Jewish folk custom, and unerring feel for the heroism of everyday life. His novels, including The Family Moskat and Enemies: A Love Story , and his short stories, such as "Yentl" and "Gimpel the Fool," prove him a consummate storyteller and probably the greatest Yiddish writer of the twentieth century. 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. "Isaac Bashevis Singer brought the vibrant milieu of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewry to the English-speaking world through his subtle psychological insight, deep sympathy for the eccentricities of Jewish folk custom, and unerring feel for the heroism of everyday life. His novels, including The Family Moskat and Enemies: A Love Story, and his short stories, such as "Yentl" and "Gimpel the Fool," prove him a consummate storyteller."--BOOK JACKET Frontmatter Introduction (page xi) Prologue (page 3) Chapter 1 (page 15) Chapter 2 (page 31) Chapter 3 (page 55) Chapter 4 (page 78) Chapter 5 (page 93) Chapter 6 (page 109) Chapter 7 (page 128) Chapter 8 (page 149) Chapter 9 (page 163) Chapter 10 (page 185) Chapter 11 (page 207) Epilogue (page 215) Notes (page 217) Index (page 237) [with A New Introduction By] Janet Hadda. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 217-235) And Index.
