Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born American Jewish writer who wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated himself into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).
Israel Joshua Singer was a Polish-Jewish novelist who wrote in Yiddish.
Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
David G. Roskies is an internationally recognized Canadian literary scholar, cultural historian and author in the field of Yiddish literature and the culture of Eastern European Jewry. He is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and Professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Hinde Ester Singer Kreytman, known in English as Esther Kreitman, was a Yiddish-language novelist and short story writer. She was born in Biłgoraj, Vistula Land to a rabbinic Jewish family. Her younger brothers Israel Joshua Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer subsequently became writers.
Leonard Wolf was a Romanian-American poet, author, teacher, and translator. He is known for his authoritative annotated editions of classic gothic horror novels, including Dracula, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera, and other critical works on the topic; and also for his Yiddish translations of works ranging from those of Isaac Bashevis Singer to Winnie-the-Pooh. He was the father of Naomi Wolf.
Enemies, A Love Story is a 1989 American romantic drama film directed by Paul Mazursky, based on the 1966 novel Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The film stars Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin and Margaret Sophie Stein. The film received positive reviews from critics and three nominations at the 62nd Academy Awards; Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Shosha is a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. The original Yiddish version appeared in 1974 in the Jewish Daily Forward under the title Soul Expeditions.
Satan in Goray is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It was originally published between January and September 1933 in installments in the Yiddish literary magazine Globus in Poland and in 1935 it was printed as a book. It was Singer's first published novel.
Isaac in America: A Journey With Isaac Bashevis Singer is a 1986 documentary made by director Amram Nowak and producer Kirk Simon. It was broadcast on the PBS series American Masters.
Zalmen Mlotek is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community.
Irene Lieblich was a Polish-born artist and Holocaust survivor noted for illustrating the books of Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and for her paintings highlighting Jewish life and culture. She is also a distant cousin of noted Yiddish language author and playwright Isaac Leib Peretz.
The Slave is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer originally written in Yiddish that tells the story of Jacob, a scholar sold into slavery in the aftermath of the Khmelnytsky massacres, who falls in love with a gentile woman. Through the eyes of Jacob, the book recounts the history of Jewish settlement in Poland at the end of the 17th century. While most of the book's protagonists are Jews, the book is also a criticism of Orthodox Jewish society. The English version was translated by the author and Cecil Hemley.
Yevgeny Arye was an Israeli theater director, playwright, scriptwriter, and set designer.
Eleanor Chana Mlotek was a musicologist, specializing in Yiddish folklore. Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate, once called Mlotek and her husband, Joseph, “the Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs.” She was also inducted in Hunter College's Hall of Fame.
The Penitent (1983) is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991). It was originally published in installments in The Jewish Daily Forward (1973) with the Yiddish title of Der Baal Tshuve. The English translation was made by Joseph Singer for Farrar Straus & Giroux. It tells the story of Joseph Shapiro, emigrating from Poland in 1939 and from USSR in 1945 to the United States in 1947, where he becomes rich and involved with consumism and lust, so that he decides to leave everything, including his job, his wife and his lover, and finally expatriate to Israel, where he wonders about the traditional values of Jewish culture.
A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories is a 1973 book of short stories written by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It shared the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The twenty-four (24) stories in this collection were translated from Yiddish by Singer, Laurie Colwin, and others.
Evelyn Torton Beck has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Magician of Lublin is a novel by Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Though originally written in Yiddish, it was first published in English in 1960 in the United States by Noonday, and in 1961 in the United Kingdom by Secker & Warburg. In 1971, the book was published in Yiddish by Hamenorah.
Eli Schechtman was a Yiddish writer. He defined the purpose of his work as follows: "My mission in Jewish literature was and still is ... to show to those who negate the power of the Galut, how mighty – spiritually and physically – were the generations who grew up in that Galut, even in the most godforsaken places."
