Singer's extensive body of work is preoccupied with the destruction of the lost Orthodox Jewish world of Eastern Europe. For Singer, the faith that characterized this world was eroded for Jews by two forces: secular rationalism, coupled with the temptation to acculturate to Western norms; and the physical destruction of the Jews of Europe. The tension in Singer's fiction is always generated by the conflict between the old ways and the new, between faith and rationalism, between the sacred and the profane. His typical protagonist is a man like himself who abandons the regimen of strict, devout Orthodox Jewish observance in which he was raised and embraces the secular, modern world but is unable to find contentment there. The irreconcilable demands of the world of skeptical rationalism and the world of unquestioning faith generate the kind of anxiety and disillusionment that link Singer's fiction, in content if not in form, with the thematic preoccupations of modernism, the challenge to human existence in the twentieth century.
The son and grandson of rabbis on both sides of his family, Singer was born Icek-Hersz Zynger, the second son of strictly observant Orthodox Jewish parents, on 14 July 1904 in the village of Leoncin, a provincial town northeast of Warsaw in Poland, where his father, Pinkhos-Menakhem Zynger, was the resident rabbi.
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