Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), Polish-American author, was admired for his re-creation of the forgotten world of provincial 19th-century Poland and his depiction of a timeless Jewish ghetto existence. Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on July 14, 1904,...

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, was among the most popular and widely read authors of the twentieth century. By the time of his death at the age of eighty-seven, Singer had received a lion'...

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, first began to write for children in 1966. Three of his first four books were Newbery Honor Books; his fifth, A Day of Pleasure, was the winner of the National Book Award in 1970. H...

Minority Reports ENEMIES: A Love Story strives relentlessly, as befits a movie based on a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, to combine sex with metaphysics. I haven't read the book -- Singer is not my cup of chicken soup -- but the...

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The Film Society of Lincoln Center is devoting the month of May to three comparatively unexplored talents who helped make the 60’s and 70’s such venturesome decades of American filmmaking: actor-director Paul Mazursky (May 4 through May 10); actor Lee Marvin (May 11 to 24):...

In the following essay, Cohen considers the role of female characters in Singer's fiction through analysis of Enemies and Shosha. Cohen concludes that Singer's fiction is not misogynistic, as some feminist critics claim, but often portrays women as powerful symbolic figures that force male protagonists into uncomfortable revelations about themselves and the world.

[In Enemies: A Love Story Singer created a masterpiece of Jewish amatory surrealism that] painted the madness of the flesh against a backdrop of imminent world destruction…. [Shosha is] a quintessential tale of the Jewish soul in perpetual exile. [Like Enemies, it] portrays lust roaming through a decaying world, specifically, prewar Warsaw—only this time with such intense attention to realistic detail that we are transported into the realm of caricature. The characters here—as in the au...