Volume 4, Number 6 · April 22, 1965
The Genius of Isaac Bashevis Singer
By Ted Hughes
Satan In Goray
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 239 pp., $1.25 (paper)
The Family Moskat
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 611 pp., $2.25 (paper)
The Magician of Lublin
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 246 pp., $1.65 (paper)
The Slave
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 246 pp., $3.50
Gimpel The Fool
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Noonday, 205 pp., $1.45 (paper)
The Spinoza of Market Street:
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 214 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Short Friday
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 243 pp., $4.95
Isaac Bashevis Singer emigrated to the United States in 1935, which was the year of his first novel Satan in Goray. Since then, he has written more or less exclusively about the Jewish world of pre-war Poland, or more exactly—it's a relevant qualification—about the Hasidic world of pre-war Poland, into which he was born, the son of a rabbi, in 1904. So not only does he write in Yiddish, but his chosen subject is even further confined in place, and culture, and now to the past. Nevertheless, his work has been lucky with its translators, and he has to be considered among the really great living writers, on several counts.
Review, 3030 words
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