Biography Essay

In his novels and short stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer has created a world of ghosts, dybbuks, witches, and demons, a world of eccentric people strongly rooted in the shtetls of Poland and of disoriented emigres haunted by memories of the shtetls as they walk the streets of Manhattan or Miami Beach. Singer has created a world that reaches beyond the perimeters of traditional Yiddish literature, of people yearning for erotic love and of people possessed by perverse or even demonic kinds of love. His fictional universe has fascinated readers from America to Japan and has carved for Singer a permanent niche both in Yiddish literature and in the literary history of the world—a niche strengthened by his winning two National Book Awards and the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature. Singer writes his works in Yiddish, often having them serialized in the Yiddish newspaper the Jewish...