Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$88.00 + shipping
Condition: Good
Description: In Yiddish. 416 pages. 235 x 180 mm. With additional title page in English. FIRST EDITION of an early novel by Singer. Book block intact and in very good condition, but detached from the binding, which is here. Also first two leaves are detached. Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-American writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. (November 11, 1903 Leoncin village near Warsaw, capital of Congress Poland in the Russian Empire - lands that were a part of the Russian partition territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - July 24, 1991 Surfside, Florida). The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most probably it was November 11 a date Singer gave both to his official biographer Paul Kresh and his secretary Dvorah Telushkin. The often-quoted birth date, July 14, 1904 was made up by the author in his youth, possibly to appear too young to be drafted. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974). His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Bilgoraj. Singer later used her name in his pen name "Bashevis" (Bathsheba's). Both his older siblings, Esther Kreitman and brother Israel Joshua Singer were writers as well. The family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva. After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the family moved to Warsaw. In 1923, his older brother Israel Joshua arranged for him to move to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the Jewish Literarische Bleter, of which the brother was an editor. In 1935 Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States. The move separated the author from his common-law first wife Runia Pontsch and son Israel Zamir (1929–2014); they emigrated to Moscow and then Palestine. The three met again twenty years later in 1955. Singer settled in New York City, where he was a journalist and columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward , a Yiddish-language newspaper. After a promising start, he became despondent and for some years felt "Lost in America" (title of his 1974 novel published in Yiddish; published in English in 1981). In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann née Haimann (1907-1996), a German-Jewish refugee from Munich. They married in 1940, and their union seemed to release energy in him; he returned to prolific writing and to contributing to the Forward. In addition to his pen name of "Bashevis," he published under the pen names of "Warszawski" (pron. Varshavsky) during World War II, and "D. Segal." They lived for many years in the Belnord apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Singer's first published story won the literary competition of the literarishe bletter and garnered him a reputation as a promising talent. Singer published his first novel, Satan in Goray, in installments in the literary magazine Globus, which he had co-founded with his life-long friend, the Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin in 1935. The book recounts events of 1648 in the village of Goraj (close to Bilgoraj). A third of Polish Jewry was murdered by Cossacks in the massacres. It explores the effects of the 17th century false messiah, Shabbatai Zvi, on the local population. Its last chapter imitates the style of a medieval Yiddish chronicle. With a stark depiction of innocence crushed by circumstance, the novel appears to foreshadow coming danger. In his later work, The Slave (1962), Singer returns to the aftermath of 1648, in a love story between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman. . . .
Seller: Meir Turner, New York, NY, U.S.A.
SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS. Di Familie Mushkat (Vol. I and II). Morris Skalarsky, New York, 1950.
Price: US$303.07 + shipping
Condition: Near Fine
Description: First edition in yiddish; two volumes in publisher's black cloth binding; vol. I first board a little loose, rubbed at edges, especially sp!ne ends; vol. II tight, minimal rubbed at edges; 416 and vol II 421-750; inside good condition, light reading signs in vol I;
Seller: Magnus, Paris, France