Isaac Bashevis Singer's Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: Spiritual Reappraisal (1946-1955) - Explore Jewish Literature & Cultural Studies for Academic Research

with writer, translator, and literary scholar David Stromberg.

Translated and edited by David Stromberg

What is the meaning of being Jewish after the Holocaust? Perceiving a crisis of Jewish collectivity, Isaac Bashevis Singer decided to confront this question in all its thorny intricacy. Via these endlessly humane and probing essays, he lays out the case for Jewish common ideals, insisting that inherent to every Jewish soul is a unique sense of purpose. He makes an impassioned plea to resurrect and preserve Yiddish as a unifying spiritual force, weighs the imperatives and limitations of Zionism, and highlights the all-conquering power of language in a world where “billions of words are disseminated daily at the speed of light.”

Fans of the Nobel-winning author’s beloved fiction will find here an equally engrossing intellectual thinker, his diamond-sharp journalistic prose made effortlessly readable through David Stromberg’s nimble translation. Stromberg also provides succinct introductions to each piece, placing them in their wider historical context.

Singer’s trenchant analysis of the modern Jewish experience is uncompromising yet ultimately optimistic. Threaded with universal wisdom and offering a bracing corrective against moral relativism that resonates notably today, this volume is no less than a blueprint on how to live.