In My Father's Court (Isaac Bashevis Singer: Classic Editions)

One of Isaac Bashevis Singer's most iconic books, In My Father's Court is a poignant memoir of his childhood in the household and rabbinical court of his father. This collection of vignettes is full of spirits and demons, washerwomen and rabbis, beggars and wanderers who filled Krochmalna Street – the alley-like block that contained an entire universe of Jewish life, which Singer forever memorialized in this volume. The remembrance of Singer's pious father, his rational yet adoring mother, his sister and brother, and the never-ending parade of humanity that marched through their home is a portrait of a magnificent writer's young self and of the world, now gone, that formed him.

Praise:

"In My Father's Court is no more a book about court cases than Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches is about hunting. For what Mr. Singer has done is to recreate that boiling, God-haunted world of Russian and Polish Jewry that existed within the larger world of Czarist Russia--a sphere that must have seemed to their neighbors puzzling, queer and impenetrable. . . . It was a world that was crumbling, that was ruined in World War I, obliterated in World War II. This memoir brings it to life again, not as a museum piece but with its people and its life intact." — The New York Times Review of Books

“The sort of book . . . only a writer at the height of his powers, firmly in command of his created world, his mind charged with vivid memories, can somehow shake effortlessly out of his sleeve . . . [The writing is] often close to the Biblical directness of feeling that Tolstoy prescribed for the 'universal art of the future.'” ― The New Leader

“A world that no longer exists reaches us through one of the greatest literary artists of our time.” ― Saturday Review

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American author of short stories, novels, essays, cultural criticism, memoirs, and stories for children. His career spanned nearly seven decades of literary production, at the center of which was the translation of his work from Yiddish into English, which he undertook with various collaborators and editors. Singer published widely during his lifetime, with nearly sixty stories appearing in The New Yorker, and received numerous awards and prizes, including two Newberry Honor Book Awards (1968 & 1969), two National Book Awards (1970 & 1974) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1978). Known for fiction that portrayed 19th-century Polish Jewry as well as supernatural tales that combined Jewish mysticism with demonology, Singer was a master storyteller whose sights were set squarely on the tension between human nature and the human spirit.