Böcker av Isaac Bashevis Singer

The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray.

Eight tales-one for each night of Hanukkah-demonstrating the inventive storytelling powers of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. Miracles and visitations abound in the world Singer portrays, a world in which love triumphs over time and tribulation, and faith prevails. Each story is invested with the mystical spirit of Hanukkah. "The Power of Light can enrich readers of all faiths, all ages, with its descriptions of the miraculous power of light over evil. The stories also reveal Singer's genius.''-Publishers Weekly

Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who grew up in a strictly Orthodox Hasidic household in Poland, presents a version of the legend surrounding the 18th century founder of Hasidism known as the Baal Shem Tov. As Singer writes in his author's note, "This short book does not pretend to be a biography of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov by any means. So little is known about his life that no life story is possible. This work is nothing more than the writer's impressions or fantasies of Rabbi Israel's way of thinking, his emotions, his spiritual achievements and disappointments."

THE CAFETERIA, Based on the story by Isaac Bashevis Singer Adapted by Rhys Adrian 6 characters, doubling permitted Based on Singer's short story, "The Cafeteria," which first appeared in English in The New Yorker in 1968, this adaptation was written and produced for BBC2 Playhouse, airing on August 13, 1974. The script has been modified for this Playsmith edition to be performed as a one-act play on a bare stage with furniture and props. Minor edits have been made for the sake of live performance.

>10 characters, doubling permitted Based on Singer's short story, "The Joke," which first appeared in English in The New Yorker in 1970, this adaptation was written and produced for BBC2 Playhouse, airing on August 6, 1974. The script has been modified for this Playsmith edition to be performed as a one-act play on a bare stage with furniture and props. Minor edits have been made for the sake of live performance.

By the time Isaac Bashevis Singer published the three short-story collections gathered in this Library of America volume-A Friend of Kafka (1970), A Crown of Feathers (1973), and Passions (1975)-he had made his home in America for nearly four decades. Earning his living as a columnist for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), he had risen from nearly complete anonymity outside of his Yiddish readership to international celebrity as "the last of the great Yiddish fiction writers," as Anzia Yzierska once called him. Awarded prizes, fêted in the United States and abroad, eagerly sought for lectures and interviews, he had brought about this remarkable transformation primarily though the translation of his stories. Often collaborating with his translators, Singer intended the English version of his stories to be regarded not as diminished approximations of his Yiddish stories but as works shaped by the author in the language of his adopted homeland.The sixty-five stories in Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions-the second of three volumes-reflect Singer's origins in Poland and his long exile in America. Although he continued to write tales drawing on Jewish folk traditions and supernaturalism, many of his stories from the late 1960s and early 1970s take place in the United States, as Singer explored the psychic devastation wrought by the Nazi genocide on Holocaust survivors ("The Cafeteria"), evoked the fragility of transplanted forms of Jewish life and belief ("The Cabalist of East Broadway"), and reflected on the spiritual hazards of worldly success in America ("Old Love"). Stories such as "A Day in Coney Island," "A Tutor in the Village," and "The Son"-based on Singer's reunion with his son Israel Zamir after a twenty-year separation-show Singer blurring the line between autobiography and fiction, a tendency that marks much of his later writing.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

In the wake of his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer published several volumes of short stories in collections that mingled recent work with previously untranslated stories written in Yiddish decades earlier. Stretching back to "The Jew from Babylon," a story first published in 1932, and gathering tales such as "Brother Beetle" and "There are No Coincidences" from the 1960s, the works collected in this Library of America volume, the third of three, serve as a retrospective view of Singer's achievement as a storyteller.Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah also contains ten stories published in English translation for the first time, selected from the extensive collection of Singer's papers at the University of Texas. Ranging from "Between Shadows," an evocative, naturalistic sketch set in Warsaw, to the bittersweet melodrama "Morris and Timma," to the beguiling fable "Hershele and Hanele, or The Power of a Dream." These stories enrich our understanding of Singer as a writer. The volume also includes "The Bird," "My Adventures as an Idealist," "and "Exes," stories published in magazines that were not included in any of Singer's collections. Complementing the seventy-eight stories gathered here is the introduction to Gifts (1985), a version of a lecture Singer had delivered since the early 1960s-sometimes called "Why I Write as I Do"-which illuminates his biography, philosophical outlook, and literary aims.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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

As a young man in Warsaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) wrote naturalist stories, sketches, and his first memoir, and translated eleven books of contemporary European literature into Yiddish. Published originally in the Yiddish press under the pseudonym Yitskhok Bashevis, the edition introduces the early writings in fluent English translations. The early fiction and non-fiction are annotated, richly illustrated, and includes a literary historical introduction.

Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Mirror was written for the Yale Repertory Theater production in 1972-1973. Set in a shtetl in Poland, the play is based on Singer's 1955 story of the same name, originally narrated by the demon. It deals with sexual fantasies born of denial, neglect, and repression, delving into the netherworld to discover that demons are not very different from human beings. The play incorporates one of Singer's esoteric characters, the Jew of Babylon, a miracle worker and exorcist who is swept up into the dark that he battles each day. From the New York Times: "The Mirror . . . is an, erotic and moral fable dramatizing, among other things, the dangers of fulfilling daydreams. . . .The work is full of bizarre absurdities, magic potions, exorcisms and incantations but the author-with his tongue in cheek-never loses sight of humanity. This is Singer in a playful mood.

Likely written in the 1950s, Sodom is an original play by the Polish-born Jewish-American laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The play, based on the biblical tale of Lot and the destruction of Sodom, treats themes to which Singer returned over throughout his career-corruption and repentance. It also exhibits Singer's ability to move between comedy, political satire, and spiritual sentiment, all within a play that is loyal to its biblical sources. Portraying with such canonical characters as Lot and Abraham, the play shifts from comedic dialogue, to critiques of totalitarianism, to expressions of awe and faith, capturing the fear and trembling of the those who believe they have seen the great powers of the Abrahamic God. The play is both a biblical comedy and a spiritual affirmation of the human need for the Divine. 24 characters, doubling and tripling permitted

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.

In Enemies, A Love Story - an ode to the complicated postwar experience of Holocaust survivors - Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of Herman Broder, a man lost in his own indecisiveness and dishonesty. Almost before he knows it, Herman has three wives: Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who hid him from the Nazis, Masha, his beautiful and neurotic true love, and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. But the difficulty of navigating his crowded personal life, as well as the general ambiguous experience of Yiddish New York after WWII, leaves Herman with a sense of perpetually impending doom.Praise:"Isaac Bashevis Singer is both an oldΓÇÉfashioned storyteller and a modern psychological writer" - The New York Times"The hero of Enemies, A Love Story is a trigamist - a word one doesn''t get to use every day. Herman scuttles about New York with buoyant pessimism and fatalistic sweetness, trying to make his untenable life work. In his first novel set in America, Isaac Bashevis Singer works out this bizarre plot with perfect naturalness and aplomb . . . Enemies, A Love Story is a brilliant, unsettling novel." - Newsweek"It is a measure of Singer''s strength that he is able to utilize what is essentially a familiar farcical situation - a man married to three wives - to scour the empty room of one human soul pursued by the echoes of real and terrible enemies." - Kirkus Reviews

From the Nobel Prize-winning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essaysOld Truths and New Cliches collects nineteen essays-most of them previously unpublished in English-by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic vision throughout an astonishing and prolific literary career spanning more than six decades. Expanding on themes reflected in his best-known work-including the literary arts, Yiddish and Jewish life, and mysticism and philosophy-the book illuminates in new ways the rich intellectual, aesthetic, religious, and biographical background of Singer's singular achievement as the first Yiddish-language author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.Like a modern Montaigne, Singer studied human nature and created a body of work that contributed to a deeper understanding of the human spirit. Much of his philosophical thought was funneled into his stories. Yet these essays, which Singer himself translated into English or oversaw the translation of, present his ideas in a new way, as universal reflections on the role of the artist in modern society. The unpublished essays featured here include "e;Old Truths and New Cliches,"e; "e;The Kabbalah and Modern Times,"e; and "e;A Trip to the Circus."e;Old Truths and New Cliches brims with stunning archival finds that will make a significant impact on how readers understand Singer and his work. Singer's critical essays have long been overlooked because he has been thought of almost exclusively as a storyteller. This book offers an important correction to the record by further establishing Singer as a formidable intellectual.

It is Warsaw in the 1930s, the years of Hitler's rise to power. Aaron Greidinger, familiarly known as Tsutsik, and an aspiring young writer, struggles to be true to his art when he is faced with a chance of riches and a passport to America. Tsutsik finds himself emotionally involved with four women-Betty, who admires his talent; Celia, an older married woman he meets through Dr. Feitelzohn, a senior member of the Writers' Club; Tekla, a girl from the country who works as a maid in his new flat; and Dora the Marxist, an old flame with whom he is reconciled on the eve of her Soviet departure. "In all the novels I have read," Tsutsik tells himself, "the hero desires only one woman, but here I was lusting after the whole female gender." One spring day, walking with Betty through his old Krochmalna Street neighborhood, Tsutsik rediscovers his past-in the person of his childhood playmate, Shosha, still an innocent young woman. Tsutsik's and Shosha's subsequent fate and that of all of his friends, revealed in an epilogue in Israel, rounds off this wonderful saga of human unpredictability, self-deception, and humor in the midst of tragedy.One of Singer's most personal works, Shosha is an unforgettable novel about the conflicted desires, lost lives and the redemption of one man. "Isaac Bashevis Singer...celebrates the dignity, mystery, and unexpected joy of living with more art and fervor than any other writer alive," Peter R. Prescott stated in Newsweek when the novel was first published. "He is concerned with all the major themes, with good and evil, belief and doubt, action and contemplation, the nature of illusion and the joys of the flesh." With the publication of Shosha, the novelist confirmed his position as one of the major figures in Twentieth Century American Letters.