Lost in America

viii, [4], 259, [1] pages. DJ has some wear and soiling. Autographed copy sticker on front of DJ. Signed by the author on the half-title page. Colorfully illustrated endpapers. Illustrations (including color plates). Isaac Bashevis Singer (November 11, 1903 - July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American writer who wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated himself into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was 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). In 1935, four years before the Nazi invasion, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States. He was fearful of the growing threat in neighboring Germany. Singer settled in New York City, where he took up work as 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 memoir, published in English in 1981). The artists who have illustrated Singer's novels, short stories, and children's books, include Raphael Soyer, Maurice Sendak, Larry Rivers, and Irene Lieblich. Singer published at least 18 novels, 14 children's books, a number of memoirs, essays and articles. He is best known as a writer of short stories, which have been published in more than a dozen collections. Isaac Singer takes us back in time to the mid-Thirties, when he was a young man in Poland, struggling to eke out a living and dreaming of joining his brother in America. This is the tale of how he made that trip and found himself confronting a strange land where an uncertain future lay ahead (from the dust-jacket). Singer is the seventh American and sole Yiddish writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 1978. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Nobel Laureate continues his selective, semi-fictional memoirs with a third, large-print volume illustrated by Raphael Soyer. It's now 1935, and Isaac must escape from Poland and join his older brother in N.Y. Which means leaving behind his assorted amours: Trotskyite Lena, now pregnant; epically depressed matron Stefa; and cousin Esther. But Isaac does manage to get his visa and trembles his way across Europe to the boat at Cherbourg. He's lost on the ship. He fears that his dining-hall card marked "second sitting" is a signal to the waiter "to poison my food." He ends up eating in his cabin, served stale bread and cheese by "a man who could be a prison guard". . .until meeting congenial virgin Zosia. And once settled in Brooklyn, near writer brother Joshua, he's overwhelmed with melancholy: he can't write; he knows no English; he has an obsessive affair with an older woman, a haunted widow. Worse yet, he'll be deported if he doesn't get a permanent visa. So he embarks on a nerve-wracking scheme requiring him to sneak into Canada—and his accomplice is Zosia, who clearly hopes to lose her virginity on the trip. Isaac returns to his cockroach-infested room, Zosia marries a rich oddball, life goes on: "I am lost in America, lost forever." And despite the nonstop laments, this sharp, shapely memoir bounces along quite merrily—with the wicked, ironic grace of three or four overlapping Singer stories. Raphael Zalman Soyer (December 25, 1899 - November 4, 1987) was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter. He is identified as a Social Realist because of his interest in men and women viewed in contemporary settings which included the streets, subways, salons and artists' studios of New York City. He also illustrated two other books for Isaac Bashevis Singer, entitled A Little Boy in Search of God and Love and Exile.…