 First English edition | |
| Author | Isaac Bashevis Singer |
|---|---|
| Original title | Shosha |
| Cover artist | Muriel Nasser [1] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | Yiddish |
| Publisher | Farrar Straus Giroux |
Publication date | 1978 |
| Pages | 277 |
| ISBN | 0-374-26336-1 |
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. [2]
The main character is aspiring author Aaron Greidinger who lives in the Hasidic quarter of the Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw during the 1930s.
"I was an anachronism in every way, but I didn't know it, just as I didn't know that my friendship with Shosha [..] had anything to do with love." [2]
Aaron had many love affairs with women, but the only woman he truly loved was Shosha, his childhood friend. Shosha was struck by a sleeping disease and had since barely grown physically and was mentally retarded. Aaron lived his childhood on 10 Krochmalna Street, and lost the sight of her as he moved away and she moved from no. 10 to no. 7.
Hitler is in power in Germany and is set to annihilate the Jews in Poland while in Russia, Stalin rules with his deadly terror, so the only voluntary exit that many of the characters in Shosha perceive for themselves is suicide. Although Aaron is offered the opportunity to leave the threat of death — as others, from Hassidics to Hedonists, do — he turns down the chance to escape, for his love for Shosha and chooses to stay in Poland. Death is the cloud that hangs over the characters in Shosha. As writer whose main medium is language, the book opens by explaining that Aaron was brought up on three dead languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish.
The epilogue of Shosha is an abrupt fast-forward from before the outbreak of the Second World War in Poland to the early fifties. It takes place thirteen years after the last chapter, when Aaron meets Haiml Chentshiner in Israel. The epilogue is a concise dialogue in which each recounts the death of their friends. Shosha, Bashele, Moishe, Betty, Celia, and Aaron's mother have all died.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works 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).
Yentl is a play by Leah Napolin and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Israel Joshua Singer was a Polish-Jewish novelist who wrote in Yiddish.
The Bombing of Frampol occurred during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. On 13 September, the town of Frampol with a population of 4,000 was bombed by the German bombers of Luftwaffe's 8th Air Corps, under General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen. The town had no military value, and the bombing was seen as a practice run for future missions.
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.
Zypora Spaisman was an actress and Yiddish theatre empresaria.
Enemies, A Love Story is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer first published serially in the Jewish Daily Forward on February 11, 1966. The English translation was published in 1972.
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.
Margot Zemach was an American illustrator of more than forty children's books, some of which she also wrote. Many were adaptations of folk tales from around the world, especially Yiddish and other Eastern European stories. She and her husband Harvey Fischtrom, writing as Harve Zemach, collaborated on several picture books including Duffy and the Devil for which she won the 1974 Caldecott Medal.
The History of Love: A Novel is the 2005 novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss.The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction.
Gesher Theater is an Israeli theater company founded in 1991 in Tel Aviv by new immigrants from Russia.
Miriam Kressyn, one of the "First Ladies of the Yiddish Theater", acted and sang on stage, film and radio; she wrote plays as well.
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.
Rajzel Żychlińsky was a Polish-born writer of poetry in Yiddish. She published seven collections over six decades. Her first two collections were published in Warsaw in 1936 and 1939, just prior to World War II. She survived the war by fleeing eastward to the Soviet Union, but many members of her immediate family were murdered in the Holocaust. Her postwar poetry, mostly written in the United States, was strongly influenced by these events.
Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories is a 1966 book of short stories written by Polish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer. The stories were translated from Yiddish, which was Singer's language of choice for writing, by Singer and Elizabeth Shub. Maurice Sendak provided illustrations for the book. Among other recognition the book received, it was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal in 1967. It has been translated into many languages.
Agata Tuszynska is a Polish writer, poet and journalist.
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.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)