Writing
Singer's first published story won the literary competition of the "literarishe bletter" and garnered him a reputation as a promising talent. A reflection of his formative years in "the kitchen of literature" can be found in many of his later works. IB Singer published his first novel Satan in Goray in installments in the literary magazine Globus, which he cofounded with his life-long friend, the Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin in 1935. It tells the story of events in 1648 in the village of Goraj (close to Biłgoraj), where the Jews of Poland lost a third of their population in a cruel uprising by Cossacks, and details the effects of the seventeenth-century faraway false messiah Shabbatai Zvi on the local population. Its last chapter imitates the style of 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, where he depicts the traumatized and desperate survivors of the historic catastrophe with even deeper understanding.
Read more about this topic: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only
way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me,
everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of
them that I know can want to know it and so I write
for myself and strangers.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)