Most Popular Books by Isaac Bashevis Singer

A Jewish refugee who escaped Hitler''s Holocaust and is living in New York with his second wife faces a dilemma when he discovers that his first wife is still alive.

Shosha is a hauntingly lyrical love story set in Jewish Warsaw on the eve of its annihilation. Aaron Greidinger, an aspiring Yiddish writer and the son of a distinguished Hasidic rabbi, struggles to be true to his art when faced with the chance at riches and a passport to America. But as he and the rest of the Writers'' Club wait in horror for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, Aaron rediscovers Shosha, his childhood love-still living on Krochmalna Street, still mysteriously childlike herself-who has been waiting for him all these years.

From the Nobel Prize–winning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essays Old Truths and New Clichés collects nineteen essays—most of them previously unpublished in English—by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic vision throughout an astonishing and prolific literary career spanning more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 The unpublished essays featured here include “Old Truths and New Clichés,” “The Kabbalah and Modern Times,” and “A Trip to the Circus.” Old Truths and New Clichés 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.

An authentic literary great, Singer was an author whose extraordinary talents won him a worldwide audience. And with this impressive novel, he proved that he was at the height of his creative power until his recent death at age 86. Scum evokes the teeming life of 1906 Warsaw''s backstreets. Max Barabander, distraught over the recent death of his son, flees the life of wealth and respectability he has attained in Buenos Aires, to return to the poverty and shadows of his youth spent in Warsaw. He fears impotence which leads him to the pursuit of mindless sex with five different women who view him only as an escape from their drab lives. The author recalls the teeming life of 1906 Jewish Warsaw in this impressive novel of changing mores and values. . .

Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

These are wonderful [Yiddish] stories with vivid characterizations, lush imagery, and plots rich with emotion and imagination. My favorite is Passions: a meditation on how man becomes obsessed with something--to the extent of transforming one''s life--anything can become a passion. --David Oberlander at Amazon.com.

This work chronicles 10 years in the life of Isacc Bashevis Singer, as shared by a fellow writer close to him at the time. Goran recounts the course of their friendship. This is an opportunity to learn about the Yiddish writer who often concealed hie real beliefs, feelings and personal history.

Love and Exile contains the three volumes of the Nobel Prize Winner''s spiritual autobiography, covering his childhood in a rabbinical household in Poland, his young manhood in Warsaw and his beginning as a writer, and his emigration to New York before the outbreak of war, with the concomitant displacement of a Yiddish writer in a strange land.

"This classic collection explores the varieties of wisdom gained with age and especially those that teach us how to love, as ''in love the young are just beginners and the art of loving matures with age and experience''. Tales of curious marriages and divorce mingle with psychic experiences and curses, acts of bravery and loneliness, love and hatred"--

This a selection of forty-seven stories chosen by the [Nobel-Prize-winning] author from eight prior collections [1957-1981].

In an age of darkness Poland lives under the iron fist of Krol Rudy until their leader, returns with the knowledge of an outside civilised world.

The Manor and The Estate—combined in this one-volume edition—bold tales of Polish Jews in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time of rapid industrial growth and radical social change that enabled the Jewish community to move from the ghetto to prominent positions within Polish society.

Joseph Shapiro, a New York businessman, experiences a mid-life crisis. He leaves his wife, his mistress, his business and goes to Israel in search of religious Orthodoxy.

Set in nineteenth-century Poland, this novel tells the story of Yasha - a sword swallower, fire eater, acrobat and master of escape - famous for Houdini-like tricks. A free thinker with an observant Jewish wife at home and a woman in every town, his exploits catch up with him and he is tempted to make one final escape - from his marriage, his homeland, and his father''s religious heritage. But his plans unravel and he instead seeks to lock himself up in a place that even he won''t be able to escape - and to spend the rest of his days doing penitence.

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.

Singer''s late novel, a magical and resonant fable, recreates the birth of the Polish nation. Through the compelling figure of Cybula, defeated leader of a tribe of hunter-gatherers, it explores the moment when prehistory dissolved into history, superstitions became tinged with skepticism, and men began to turn from many gods towards one god.

THE STORY: Set in the 1950s on Manhattan''s Upper West Side, MESHUGAH is a tragicomic portrait of a community of recent Jewish émigrés living in the wake of the Holocaust. When Aaron Greidinger, a struggling novelist and advice columnist, falls in l

In his classic followup to his debut story collection, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer continues to introduce readers to his unique brand of fiction in eleven unforgettable stories. Praise: "The most brilliant living representative of the Yiddish language in prose and one of the important contemporary writers in America." - The New York Times Review of Books "There is a very old, durable and sage glow to these stories." - Kirkus "Sparkling and triumphant, Isaac Bashevis Singer''s stories are filled with wonder, gratitude, humor, irony and a wry eroticism that manages to exalt the pleasures of the flesh and the soul at the same time." - The Washington Post Book World

‘[A] delightful and distinguished book [of seven tales] from middle European folklore [by the winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature].’ —BL. 1967 Newbery Honor Book Notable Children''s Books of 1940–1970 (ALA) 1966 Fanfare Honor List (The Horn Book) "Best of the Best" Children''s Books 1966–1978 (SLJ) Best Illustrated Children''s Books of 1966 (NYT) Children''s Books of 1966 (Library of Congress) Children''s Books of the Year 1966 (CSA)

Originally published in Yiddish between 1953-1955 as a single work, Isaac Bashevis Singer''s The Manor and The Estate now appears as a single-volume English edition. Recounting the tales of Polish Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century - a time of rapid industrial growth and radical social change - the novel depicts the Jewish community moving from the ghetto to prominence within Polish society. As Singer writes in his author''s note, "All the spiritual and intellectual ideas that triumphed in the modern era had their roots in the world of that time - socialism and nationalism, Zionism and assimilationism, nihilism and anarchism, suffragettism, atheism, the weakening of the family bond, free love, and even the beginnings of Fascism." Telling the story of Calman Jacoby, who stands between the old and the new, the book portrays the difficulties encountered by traditional Jews coming to terms with the changes brought on by modernity.

As messianic zeal sweeps through medieval Poland, the Jews of Goray divide between those who, like the Rabbi, insist that no one can "force the end" and those who follow the messianic pretender Sabbatai Zevi. But as hysteria and depravity reign free, it becomes clear that it is not the Messiah who has come to Goray. Praise: "Beautifully written by one of the masters of Yiddish prose, and beautifully translated, ''''Satan in Goray'''' is folk material transmuted into literature." - The New York Times Review of Books "A gripping parable of reason versus revelation, hysteria in the face of apocalypse" - Guardian "Whatever religion his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality." - Ted Hughes, New York Review of Books "Singer sets scenes with such vividness that there is almost a smell to his books, the smell of poverty and guttering candles and decaying lives and decaying souls. - Observer "His storytelling powers are so immense, so natural. He has more creative confidence than any living writer." - Financial Times

Translated by from Yiddish by Roger H. Klein and others.

This book of twenty stories is Isaac Bashevis Singer''s fifth collection and contains such classics as "The Cafeteria" and "On the Way to the Poorhouse."

Translation of: Mayn otaotn''s beas-din-shotub.

Herman Broder, a refugee and Holocaust survivor, has three women in his life: Yadwiga, the loyal Polish peasant who hid him in a hayloft from the Nazis; Masha, his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife. Unsure of who he really is, what he wants and whether he can ever find peace, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of paranoia and impending doom. Published in 1972, Enemies, A Love Story is an astonishing novel that blends humour and pathos to create a rich, humane portrayal of a man who cannot escape his past. ''One is forever suspended between laughter and tears by this rich and marvellous novel.'' The New York Times ''Isaac Bashevis Singer is a rare pleasure . . . a literary genius.'' San Francisco Chronicle Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

It''s 1922 and David Bendiger, an aspiring eighteen-and-a-half-year-old writer, arrives in Warsaw, penniless and homeless. His only contacts are Sonya, a young woman with whom he has had amorous dealings in the village they have left, and a Zionist functionary who informs him he has qualified for a certificate permitting him to emigrate to Palestine. But in order to make the journey David must enter into a fictitious marriage with a woman so eager to get to Palestine that she will pay all the expenses. While David waits for his certificate, he becomes involved not only with Sonya but with Edusha, the sexually avant-garde Communist Party member in whose apartment he finds a temporary haven; and with Minna, the well-to-do young woman who wants to join her fiance in Palestine and agrees to "marry" David. Grappling with romantic, political, and youthful turmoil, David also confronts his literary future and religious past when his older brother - a writer disillusioned by a recent sojourn in Russia - and his father, an Orthodox rabbi, both turn up in Warsaw. The Certificate was serialized in Yiddish in 1967, but may have been written much earlier. The translator, Leonard Wolf, in a postscript calls it "a very young man''s book" and "certainly the most playful of Singer''s long fictions", with its alternately comic and poignant shifts in plot. Young David''s passions for women, philosophizing, Jewish religious speculation, and Walter Mitty-like fantasies make The Certificate a captivating novel in the great tradition of a master storyteller.

In this masterly collection of stories, lsaac Bashevis Singer once again weaves bewitching fables from seemingly ordinary lives, showing us with subtlety and compassion humanity at its most mundane and mysterious. From modern apartments in Miami to nineteenth-century Polish villages, from bravery in wartime Warsaw to a different kind of courage in Lisbon, these tales span the world and the range of human life.

A delightful sequel to a cherished autobiographical collection by the Nobel Laureate In My Father''s Court is one of Isaac Bashevis Singer''s most affecting autobiographical works. The stories in it, published serially in the Jewish Daily Forward, depict the beth din in his father''s home on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. A unique institution, the beth din was a combined court of law, synagogue, scholarly institution, and psychologist''s office where people sought out the advice and counsel of a neighborhood rabbi. The thirty-one stories gathered here, none previously published in English, show this world as it appeared to a young boy: In "A Guest in the Prayerhouse," a man who has converted to Judaism embarrasses the community with his extreme piety; in "She Will Surely Be Ashamed," a couple come for a divorce after forty years of marriage even though they are still in love; in the extraordinary "He Begs Forgiveness," a jeweler apologizes to his former fiancée for abandoning her twelve years before, igniting the imagination of the young Singer, who dreams of writing stories about dark, eternal love. From the earthy to the ethereal, these stories provide an intimate and powerful evocation of a world.

Featuring such classics as "The Cafeteria," "On the Way to the Poorhouse," "The Son," "Stories from Behind the Stove," and the title story, A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories is Isaac Bashevis Singer''s fifth collection. It brings together twenty-one tales of rabbis and writers, heretics and saints, demons and angels, populating every sort of setting from the Polish shtetl to the Upper West Side to the Yiddish colonies in South America."[Q]uite possibly the most impressive collection of Singer''s richly crafted tales." - Kirkus"All of his tales are unfailingly entertaining, but Singer''s reputation as a master storyteller rests on his ability as a teacher, in the real sense of the term: he establishes our trust in him by his open trust in us as readers, and we follow the narratives of his knowledge with a sense of personal discovery and delight at our own new perceptions about the news he has to tell us." - New York Times

Twenty short stories.