Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories Vol. 2: (LOA #150) : A Friend of Kafka to Passions (Library of America Isaac Bashevis Singer Edition) - Hardcover

Singer; Isaac Bashevis; Stavans; Ilan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1931082626 ISBN 13: 9781931082624

Publisher: Library Of America, 2004

Synopsis

By the time Isaac Bashevis Singer published the three short-story collections gathered in this Library of America volume - A Friend of Kafka (1970), A Crown of Feathers (1973), and Passions (1975) - he had made his home in America for nearly four decades. Earning his living as a columnist for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), he had risen from nearly complete anonymity outside of his Yiddish readership to international celebrity as 'the last of the great Yiddish fiction writers,' as Anzia Yzierska once called him. Awarded prizes, feted in the United States and abroad, eagerly sought for lectures and interviews, he had brought about this remarkable transformation primarily though the translation of his stories. Often collaborating with his translators, Singer intended the English version of his stories to be regarded not as diminished approximations of his Yiddish stories but as works shaped by the author in the language of his adopted homeland. The sixty-five stories in Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions-the second of three volumes-reflect Singer's origins in Poland and his long exile in America. Although he continued to write tales drawing on Jewish folk traditions and supernaturalism, many of his stories from the late 1960s and early 1970s take place in the United States, as Singer explored the psychic devastation wrought by the Nazi genocide on Holocaust survivors ('The Cafeteria'), evoked the fragility of transplanted forms of Jewish life and belief ('The Cabalist of East Broadway'), and reflected on the spiritual hazards of worldly success in America ('Old Love'). Stories such as 'A Day in Coney Island,' 'A Tutor in the Village,' and 'The Son'-based on Singer's reunion with his son Israel Zamir after a twenty-year separation - show Singer blurring the line between autobiography and fiction, a tendency that marks much of his later writing.

About this title

About the Author

Isaac Bashevis Singer emigrated to New York from Poland in 1935 and found work with the Jewish Daily Forward. Author of many novels, collections of short stories, and books for children, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the author or editor of numerous books.

Edition details

• Publisher: Library Of America
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931082626
• ISBN 13: 9781931082624
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 800