Isaac B. Singer: A Life - Hardcover

Noiville, Florence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374178003 ISBN 13: 9780374178000

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Synopsis

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) is widely recognized as the most popular Yiddish writer of the twentieth century. His translated body of work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, is beloved around the world. But although Singer was a very public and outgoing figure, much about his personal life remains unknown. In Isaac Bashevis Singer, Florence Noiville offers a glimpse into the world of this much-beloved but persistently elusive figure. An astonishingly prolific writer, Singer was able to recreate the lost world of Jewish Eastern Europe and also to describe the immigrant experience in America. Drawing heavily upon folklore, Singer’s work is noted for its mystical strain. But he was also heavily concerned with the problems of his own day, and through his novels and stories runs a strong undercurrent of social consciousness. Unafraid to celebrate peasant life, Singer was often accused of being vulgar, yet he was also recognized for a deeply moral sensibility. And much like his work, Singer’s personal life was marked by contradiction: the son of a Rabbi, he struggled with warring currents of devotion and doubt. Solicitous of affection, he was also known for his philandering. Devoted to the notion of family, he abandoned his own son before the Second World War. Drawing on letters, personal recollections, and interviews with Singer’s friends, family, and publishing contemporaries, Florence Noiville speaks to these paradoxes. More appreciation than comprehensive biography, her narrative is rich in detail about the people, places, and ideas that shaped Singer’s world. A remarkably vivid portrait of the man and his work emerges—a compassionate, vivid, and insightful vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers.

About this title

Book Description

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904– 91) is generally recognized as the most popular Yiddish writer of the twentieth century. His widely translated body of work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, is beloved around the world. But although Singer was a very public and outgoing figure, much about his personal life remains unknown. In this vivid biography, Florence Noiville offers a glimpse into the world of this much-loved but persistently elusive writer.

            Singer was greatly influenced by his early years in Poland, with his rabbi father and rationalist, secular mother. His themes of faith and dilemma stem directly from this set of conflicts; he bounced back and forth between revering and fighting orthodoxy. This was not the only paradox in his life, however: this man, who wrote many successful children’ s books, had abandoned his first wife and only son in Poland as the Nazis began to sweep across Europe. His novels and stories are recognized for their mystical, folkloric tone and his public image was that of a grandfather or uncle; but he was wracked with self-doubt, a womanizer, and, as Noiville writes, a “ modern virtuoso of anguish, inhibition, and fiasco.”

            Noiville speaks to these and other paradoxes surrounding her subject, drawing on letters, personal stories, Singer’ s own autobiographies, and interviews with friends, family, and publishing contemporaries. She travels as he did, from Poland to New York to Florida, tracing his journey from penniless immigrant to Nobel laureate. By pursuing Singer’ s public and private past, she rebuilds his story and the story of the world he wrote from: a Yiddish world, a Poland removed from history by Nazi Germany.

About the Author

Florence Noiville is a journalist and literary critic for Le Monde. She has written books on Greek and Roman mythology and a biography of Paul Faucher.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0374178003
• ISBN 13: 9780374178000
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208