Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Speaking in broad terms, what do Jewish readers want from books? Do they want images of themselves? Do they desire to take stock, to see where we are now and where we came from. Or are Jewish readers concerned with a quality of reassurance – that is, Jewish books that assert Jewish worth and attest to Jewish survival?" - A conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) about the meaning and destiny of jewish literature ( By Rabbi William Berkowitz )

Issac Bashevis Singer, born in Radzymin near Warsaw, emigrated 1935 to USA. He died in 1991. He won the nobel prize in literature in 1978. He has written many novels and short stories, including The Slave, Short Friday and Other Stories, and Enemies: A Love Story, Shosha, The Manor, The Penitent, and The Death of Methuselah.

" In one of his more light-hearted books, Isaac Bashevis Singer depicts his childhood in one of the over-populated poor quarters of Warsaw, a Jewish quarter, just before and during the First World War. The book, called In My Father's Court (1966), is sustained by a redeeming, melancholy sense of humour and a clear-sightedness free of illusion."
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993

Singer lived in a time of wrenching change, uncertainity, fear, acts of great courage, pain of seperation and the stripping away of the veneer and facade of civilization. Rich material for a writer. So of all the writers who contributed to Jewish literature after the end of World war II, what is that made Singer a great writer and a nobel prize winner?

I read through the entire interview, I read through the nobel biography, and then went back to the interview and re-read the whole thing, trying to find a thread, some common principle which finds it's way into all his books, something which I could use to grasp and define.

"BERKOWITZ: Here are two statements you have made that seem to contradict each other. First: "I write about Jews. It is not that I think that they are special, but that I know them best." And yet you also say in a very beautiful passage: "I do think that as a philosophy, Judaism has unrevealed treasures which no other religion has, and it has never before happened in history that a nation has been exiled for two thousand years, then come back and formed a country. This proves that the Almighty has a purpose for the Jewish people."

SINGER: I meant this idea of Jews as topics for writing, the idea that writing about Jews will create better literature than writing about other people. In this respect I think we are not special. A great writer will always write great books, and a bad writer will write bad books, even if his people were ten times as special. So this is the reason there is no contradiction. When I said special, I meant special as far as literature is concerned, and there are people who are special for literature." - A conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) about the meaning and destiny of jewish literature ( By Rabbi William Berkowitz )

He writes about what he knows best, what he has personally experienced. Secondly, Singer did not try to impulsively inject greatness, as a reaction to the persecution, in his books, about the Jewish people. Third, he believes the greatness of the Jewish people, as a rich and endless source of material for writing, and he is thankful for that, for being born a Jew. It is this balance, this anchor in reality, while maintaining a pride in his Jewishness, that catapulted Issac Bashevis Singer from being just another Jewish writer into a great writer.