Israel Joshua Singer

Israel Joshua Singer 1893-1944, Polish-American novelist and playwright who wrote in Yiddish, older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer . Living variously in Poland and Russia, he earned a literary reputation in both countries. His collection of stories Perl un Andere Dertzeylungen (1922; tr. Pearls, 1923) was acclaimed by the New York publisher Abraham Cahan, who hired Singer as Polish correspondent to his Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward. Singer's epic masterpiece Di Bruder Ashkenazi (tr. The Brothers Ashkenazi, 1936) details Jewish industrial development before World War I. Singer emigrated to the United States in 1934.

Singer, Israel Joshua (1893–1944),Polish‐born Yiddish novelist, after a literary career in his homeland came to the U.S. (1934), sponsored by his American publisher, Abraham Cahan. The next year he was followed by his brother Isaac Bashevis Singer. In the U.S. he wrote The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936), a saga of Polish Jews; In die Berg (1942), a novel set in the U.S.; and The Family Carnovsky (1943), dealing with the wanderings in Europe of a Jewish family.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–91), Polish-born Yiddish author. In 1935 he emigrated to New York, in the footsteps of his brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), and became a journalist, writing in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward, which published most of his short stories. The first of his works to be translated into English was The Family Moscat (1950), which was followed by many other works including Satan in Goray (Yiddish, 1935; English, 1955); The Magician of Lublin (1960); The Slave (1962); The Manor (1967) and its sequel The Estate (1969). His collections of stories include Gimpel the Fool (1957); The Spinoza of Market Street (1961); Zlateh the Goat (1966); and A Friend of Kafka (1970). Singer's work portrays with a colourful intensity and much realistic detail the lives of Polish Jews of many periods of Polish history, illuminated by hints of the mystic and supernatural; many of his novels and stories describe the conflicts between traditional religion and rising scepticism, between varying forms of nationalism, and between the primitive, the exotic, and the intellectually progressive. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.