In 1907, the family moved to the poor, Yiddish-speaking Jewish Quarter in Warsaw where they eventually settled in an apartment on Krochmalna Street. This street and the Jewish Quarter in Warsaw came to figure prominently in a number of Singer's works.
Due to the suffering brought about by World War I, in 1917 Singer moved with his mother and younger brother to his mother's hometown of Bilgoraj in south-eastern Poland. In the early 1920s, at the urging of his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer (also a writer), Isaac Bashevis Singer moved to Warsaw. He found a job as a proofreader for Literarische Bleter where his brother was the editor.
Greatly influenced by his older brother, Singer was determined to become a writer and began his career writing exclusively in Yiddish. His first stories were published, some serialized, in Literarische Bleter and Undzer Ekspres. In 1925 he won the first of several prizes in literature that he would earn throughout his career. The prize was for his short story entitled "In Old Age." Early in his writing career he used the pseudonym Izaak Baszewis, derived from his mother's first name, to distinguish himself from his brother. Later, he expanded his penname to how he is now known: Issac Bashevis Singer. In 1935 he emigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1943. He realized he had a limited future as a writer in America if he continued to publish only in Yiddish. Thus, he readily encouraged translations of his works into English, which he considered his second mother tongue (Yiddish being his first). As a result of this decision, he achieved worldwide recognition.
In his lifetime, Singer published 14 novels, 10 volumes of short stories, 5 volumes of memoirs, 16 books for childrem, and 3 anthologies of selected writings. Several of his works were adapted into movies: He won important and prestigious literary prizes from the United States, Italy, France, Israel, and Sweden's Nobel Prize in Literature (1978).
Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978. One of his most famous novels, due to a popular movie adaptation, was Enemies, a Love Story, in which a Holocaust survivor deals with his own desires, complex family relationships, and a loss of faith. Singer's feminist story "Yentl" has had a wide impact on culture since its conversion into popular movie starring Barbra Streisand. Perhaps the most fascinating Singer-inspired film is 1974's Mr. Singer's Nightmare or Mrs. Pupkos Beard by Bruce Davidson, a renowned photographer who became Singer's neighbor. This unique film is a half-hour mixture of documentary and fantasy for which Singer not only wrote the script but played the leading role. The 2007 film Love Comes Lately, starring Otto Tausig, was adapted from Singer's stories. Just after his 87th birthday, he died on July 24, 1991, in Surfside, Florida, where he had made his home for a number of years.
Novels
- Eulogy to a Shoelace
- The Family Moskat (1950)
- Satan in Goray (1955)
- The Magician of Lublin (1960)
- The Slave (1962)
- The Manor (1967)
- The Estate (1969)
- Enemies, a Love Story (1972)
- The Wicked City (1972)
- Shosha (1978)
- Old Love (1979)
- Reaches of Heaven: A Story of the Baal Shem Tov (1980)
- The Penitent (1983)
- Teibele and Her Demon (1983) (play)
- The King of the Fields (1988)
- Scum (1991)
- The Certificate (1992)
- Meshugah (1994)
- Shadows on the Hudson (1997)
Short story collections
- Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957)
- The Spinoza of Market Street (1963)
- Short Friday and Other Stories (1963)
- The image and other stories (1968)
- The séance and other stories (1968)
- A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (1970)
- The Fools of Chelm and Their History (1973)
- A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974) — shared the National Book Award, Fiction, with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- Passions and Other Stories (1975)
- The collected stories (1982)
Awesome Story
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