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Highlighting the coming week will not be the appearance of writer and storyteller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, not the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Thus, The Swedish Academy of Letters did not cite the author for his "impassioned narrative art which, with its roots in a Polish-Jewish tradition, brings universal human conditions to life," adding that current comparisons of Singer's work to that of Russian author Leo Tolstoy have absolutely no validity...
...Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer...
Signs of that life began in Poland, where the son and grandson of rabbis was afflicted by skepticism. "I began to doubt," he recalls, "not the power of God, but all the traditions and dogmas." Deterred from a religious vocation, Isaac followed his equally radical brother Israel Joshua to the journals of Warsaw. In his spare time, the young reporter wrote a handful of stories and a dark novel about a false messiah, Satan in Goray, that prefigured his later works...
...early '30s, just before the Holocaust, the Singer brothers left Poland for the promised city. In New York Isaac worked for the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper. "I remember thinking in those days," says the laureate, "if only somebody would guarantee me $15 a week, I could sit down and really do some work." The money was a long time coming. For two decades he was supported by his second wife, Alma, who worked as a salesclerk in Manhattan department stores. By the time of his brother's death in 1944, Singer had become a recognized writer...
From Bellow he went on to employ dozens of translators-including Joseph, I.J. Singer's son. Though Isaac Bashevis Singer has long since gained fluency in English, he continues to write in his mother tongue. "It strikes one as a kind of inspired madness," Irving Howe once wrote. Counters Singer: "Yiddish contains vitamins that other languages don't have." Choice of vitamins is not his only idiosyncrasy. A vegetarian who refuses to swat flies, a firm believer in the supernatural, Singer has mysteriously grown more prolific with age: since his 50th birthday he has written eight novels...