The Forgotten Giant of Yiddish Fiction
Though his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer eventually eclipsed him, Israel Joshua Singer excelled at showing characters buffeted by the tides of history.
In 1966, the critic Irving Howe published an essay whose title, “The Other Singer,” testified to a literary usurpation. For American readers in the nineteen-sixties, the name Singer meant Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer to have reached the pinnacle of the American literary world. Singer’s stories about Jewish life in Poland, where he was born, and New York, where he settled in 1935, appeared in the Forward, the city’s leading Yiddish newspaper, before they were published in English in magazines including this one, Harper’s, and Playboy. It was an era when Jewish fiction was in vogue, with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth on the best-seller lists; Singer won the National Book Award twice. In 1978, he became the first (and, to this day, the only) Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.