One of the most distinguished and honored of modern writers and certainly deserving of the Nobel Prize for literature awarded him in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer is an anomaly as an American and a novelist. Shaped by a culture which was not only Old World but derived from perhaps its most remarkable sector, Singer thinks and writes in a dying language, Yiddish, about a community which has vanished-- that of East European Jewry, and specifically that of the Hasidim in Poland.

Yiddish is the thousand-year-old form of German developed by Jews, using the Hebrew alphabet and incorporating ancient Hebrew and Aramaic words. Its vocabulary expanded by adapting words from European languages with which Jews had contact, including Russian, Provençal, and English. During the Middle Ages it became the language for daily speech among Jews, especially in Eastern Europe. This was their vernacular; in it practical affairs were...