Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1904 into a rabbinic family in the town of Radzymin, Poland. He learned in a “cheder” and “yeshiva” before studying in the “Tachkemoni” seminar in Warsaw. From 1923 until 1933, he worked as a translator and proofreader for the Polish Yiddish periodical, “Literarishe Bleter”.

In 1935, Singer emigrated to the United States where he wrote literary criticism, essays, books and stories and made a name for himself in Yiddish literary circles. Among his most famous works are “The Family Moskat” and “The Magician of Lublin”.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978 “for his impassioned narrative art, which, with roots in a Polish Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.”

In his books, Bashevis-Singer portrayed the life of Jews in Poland after the 1648-49 massacres and Jewish life in Warsaw before the holocaust. Some of his books and stories have been adapted for films and television.

Bashevis-Singer was a master storyteller, who drew his readers into a magical world of ghosts and spirits, temptations and desires, dreams and secret passions. He portrayed the provocative and unconventional aspects of life in the small Jewish town, the “shtettel”.

When he was asked why he continued to write in a so-called dead language, he replied, “I am sure that millions of Yiddish-speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day, and their first question will be: Is there any new book in Yiddish to read?

Isaac Bashevis Singer passed away in 1991.