The Ghost Shtetl of Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Ghost Shtetl of Isaac Bashevis Singer
30 years after his death, the Nobel laureate's village is being rebuilt, including a massive replica of a synagogue that was never there.
In his 1978 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer employed memories from his earliest years as a source of hope for coping with the troubles of modern times:
“In our home and in many other homes the eternal questions were more actual than the latest news in the Yiddish newspaper. In spite of all the disenchantments and all my skepticism I believe that the nations can learn much from those Jews, their way of thinking, their way of bringing up children, their finding happiness where others see nothing but misery and humiliation.”
As a teenager, in the midst of the First World War, Singer moved with his siblings and his mother to her hometown, the small shtetl of Biłgoraj, where they belonged to a prominent rabbinical family.
The main square in Biłgoraj around the time Singer lived there
Following a short stint in a Warsaw rabbinical seminary, a young Singer would return to the ancestral shtetl, where he would fail to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons – an interesting historical detail for the man destined become the first Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize.
Biłgoraj was home to a thriving, if modest, Jewish community, and would inspire many of Singer’s later works.