Isaac Bashevis Singer — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born Icek Hersz Zynger in the village of Leoncin near Warsaw, in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. His date of birth is uncertain: most sources give 11 November 1903, others 1902, and the Nobel Foundation records 14 July 1904. His father, Pinchas Mendel Singer, was a Hasidic rabbi; his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj, and her name gave him the "Bashevis" of his pen name. His elder brother, Israel Joshua Singer, also became a novelist.
In 1907 the family moved to the Hasidic court of Radzymin, where his father headed the yeshiva, and then to Krochmalna Street in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, where his father served the community as rabbi, judge and arbitrator. That household is the subject of his memoir In My Father's Court (1967), and the street became the setting of many of his stories. In 1917, during the German occupation of Warsaw in the First World War, his mother took him and his younger brother to her home town of Biłgoraj, where he saw a traditional shtetl at close quarters. He began rabbinical studies but chose to write, and published his first story in 1925.
In 1935 his first novel, Satan in Goray, set near Biłgoraj, appeared in serial form, and that year he emigrated to the United States, helped by his brother, who had moved to New York and worked for the Yiddish daily Forverts. Singer joined the paper as a journalist and columnist and published much of his fiction in it for the rest of his life, writing always in Yiddish. His first years in New York were difficult and he published little fiction; by the time of his later fame he had lost both parents and all three of his grown siblings.
English translations brought him a wide readership, and his memoir Lost in America (1980) recalls his first years in the city. He received the National Book Award in 1970 and 1974, and in 1978 the Nobel Prize in Literature, the only writer in Yiddish to receive it, for narrative art rooted in the Polish-Jewish cultural tradition. He also wrote some fourteen books for children.
He died in Surfside, Florida, on 24 July 1991, and is buried in Paramus, New Jersey. Streets in Surfside and on West 86th Street in New York bear his name.
"Emigrated from Poland to New York in 1935, helped by his elder brother Israel Joshua Singer, and joined the Yiddish daily Forverts."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Leoncin, Warsaw Governorate, Congress Poland
Born in Leoncin near Warsaw, then in Congress Poland under the Russian Empire, most probably in 1903 (Singer himself gave 1904). His father, a Hasidic rabbi, came from Tomaszów Lubelski. He lived in Radzymin, Warsaw (1908–1917) and Biłgoraj (1917–1921) before returning to Warsaw, and emigrated to the United States in 1935.
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Leoncin, Warsaw Governorate, Congress Poland. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself."