Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991 ). Singer was born Icek-Hersz Zynger in Radzymin, near Warsaw in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of a rabbi. Singer later used her name in his penname "Bashevis" (son of Bathsheba). His brother Israel Joshua Singer also was a noted writer and was the first and greatest literary influence on his younger brother Isaac.

Singer made his debut with Satan in Goray which was first published in Poland in 1932. It was written in the style imitative of medieval Yiddish chronicle and tells the story of the events surrounding the 17th Century false messiah Shabbatai Zvi. The people in this novel, as elsewhere with Singer, are often at the mercy of the capricious infliction of circumstance, but even more so, their own passions, manias, superstitions and fanatical dreams. In his later work The Slave (1962) Singer returned again to the 17th Century in a love story of a Jewish man and a Gentile woman.

To flee from anti-Semitism, and to follow his brother, Singer emigrated to the U.S. in 1935. Singer settled in New York, where he started writing as a journalist and columnist for The Forward, a Jewish newspaper. Throughout the 1940s, Singer's reputation began to grow among the many Yiddish-speaking immigrants. After World War II and the near destruction of the Yiddish-speaking peoples, Yiddish seemed a dead language. Though Singer had moved to the United States, he believed in the power of his native language and knew that there was still a large audience that longed to read in Yiddish. In an interview in Encounter (Feb 1979) he claimed that although the Jews of Poland had died, "something - call it spirit or whatever - is still somewhere in the universe." This is a mystical kind of feeling, but I feel there is truth in it." Singer's work is undoubtedly much indebted to the great writers of Yiddish tradition such as Sholom Aleichem, but is much more modern in approach and has been shaped by his experience in America. His themes of witchcraft, mystery and legend draw on traditional sources, but they are established in modern and ironic way. They are also concerned with the bizarre and the grotesque.

Singer published 18 novels, 14 children's books, a number of memoirs, essays and articles, but he is best known as a writer of short-stories which have appeared in over a dozen collections. The first collection of Singer's short-stories in English Gimpel, the Fool, was published in 1957. The title story was translated by Saul Bellow and published in 1952 in Partisan Review. Stories published in Daily Forward were later collected among others such as My Father's Court(1966). Later collections include A Crown of Feathers (1973), with notable masterpieces in between, such as, The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), or, A Friend of Kafka (1970). The world of his stories is the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition. It appears to include everything - pleasure and suffering, coarseness and subtlety. We find obstrusive carnality, spicy, colourful, fragrant or smelly, lewd or violent. But there is also room for sagacity, worldly wisdom and humor.

Throughout the 1960s Singer continued to write on questions of personal morality. One of his most famous novels (due to a popular movie remake) was Enemies, a Love Story in which a Holocaust survivor deals with his own desires, complex family relationships, and the loss of faith.

Singer's own relationship with religion was complex. He regarded himself as a skeptic and a loner, though he still felt connected to his Orthodox roots, and ultimately developed his own brand of religion and philosophy which he called a "private mysticism: Since God was completely unknown and eternally silent, He could be endowed with whatever traits one elected to hang upon Him."

After being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978, Singer gained a monumental status among writers throughout the world, and his reputation with non-Jewish audiences is now higher than that of any other Yiddish writer.

This book is his Nobel Prize acceptance acceptance lecture and is printed in English and Yiddish. It is signed Greetings-IB Singer.

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