Gimpel the Fool

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1903, in Leoncin, Poland, a Jewish settlement called a shtetl (a pre-World War II Eastern European village) on the outskirts of Warsaw. His parents were both descended from long rabbinical lines, but they came from oppositional factions in the Orthodox Jewish community. As a result, Isaac, his older brother Israel Joshua, and their sister Hinde Esther (Kreytman) grew up in an atmosphere of constant discourse and dialectic discussions. Singer’s work reflects the topics his family taught him to explore: the struggles between tradition and enlightenment, the old and the new, illusion and deception, and the occult and the grotesque. His stories are invariably told with a rich mix of irony, wit, wisdom, and deep insight into the human condition.

Though Singer attended rabbinical seminary, he chose to follow in his brother Israel’s footsteps and pursued a career in journalism and fiction writing. Their sister, Hinde, also chose writing as her career. Israel Singer gained a reputation for his clever stories, which captured the panorama of Yiddish and Polish culture in the pre-World War II period, and he had already begun to work as a correspondent for Forverts, a Yiddish-language New York Jewish publication (the Daily Forward) which invited him to emigrate from Poland in 1934.