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The Argentine ship La Plata was sailing from New York to Buenos Aires. The Theatre Solail, which had invited me to the première of my play, had sent me a first-class ticket. The trip was to take eighteen days.

The Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my of Chelm

The Rise and Fall of King Vaiza­tha of Chelm or How Chelm Remained Penniless

This story, first printed in the Yiddish Forverts on September 22, 1968, appeared under the pseudonym Yitskhok Varshavski. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s use of pseudonyms in Yiddish has long been discussed and assumed to have a hierarchical structure—Yitskhok Bashevis for his most recognizable work, Yitskhok Varshavski for literary criticism and memoir, and D. Segal for subject matter that might be considered lowbrow.

Isaac Bashevis Singer described his arrival in America on May 1, 1935, several times over—in the third volume of his fictionalized memoir, Gloybn un tsveyfl (Faith and Doubt, 1978), which was translated into English as Lost in America (1981) and incorporated into the three-volume Love and Exile (1985), as well as in two articles for the New York Times: “When the Old World Came to Sea Gate” (Jan. 2, 1972) and “Greenhorn in Sea Gate” (Nov. 3, 1985). As with any artist of variations, each version reveals a different aspect of Singer’s perspective on coming to America as an immigrant.

FROM TIME TO TIME I ask myself: Who needs literary fiction? Why invent things when nature and life supply so many strange events?

THE LIFEWORK OF Isaac Bashevis Singer, though researched by many, is still being mapped. Not only are there troves of unpublished or untranslated writings by Singer — fiction, memoir, and criticism — but much of the context for that work has not yet been properly explored.

In “A Letter to Mama,” which appears here for the first time in English, Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of Sam Metzger, who, having immigrated to America, marries and establishes a successful clothing shop with his wife, Bessie, without ever writing home to his widowed mother in Poland.

They all knew him although no one in Bałtów spoke to him and he spoke to no one. Maryan Skiba had served a prison term of eight years for killing his girlfriend, Zocha, because he caught her in bed with a city hall official.

David Stromberg Interviews Magda Teter About I.B. Singer, Jews, and Poland.

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER — the famed Yiddish writer who in 1935 moved from Warsaw to New York and in 1978 received the Nobel Prize for Literature as an American-Jewish author — made his first trip to Israel in the fall of 1955, arriving just after Yom Kippur and leaving about two months later.

LARB presents Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “In the Beginning,” translated from the Yiddish by David Stromberg. This is the story’s first appearance in English. It is featured in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 18, Genius

THE VERY SAME DAY I moved into the small condominium apartment in Bal Harbour, I was told about my neighbor, Priscilla Levy Clark, who was a millionairess of eighty-plus, four times widowed and three times divorced.