The University of Wisconsin Press


Biography / Jewish Interest / Twentieth-Century Literature

Isaac Bashevis Singer
A Life
Janet Hadda

With a new Introduction


"Hadda [gives] us unique, exciting insights into Singer's creative process."—Leonard Nimoy

Isaac Bashevis Singer brought the vibrant milieu of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewry to the English-speaking world through his subtle psychological insight, deep sympathy for the eccentricities of Jewish folk custom, and unerring feel for the heroism of everyday life. His novels, including The Family Moskat and Enemies: A Love Story, and his short stories, such as "Yentl" and "Gimpel the Fool," prove him a consummate storyteller and probably the greatest Yiddish writer of the twentieth century.

"The iridescent charm of Isaac Bashevis Singer is such as to give the slip to the very letters of the alphabet, but Janet Hadda has out-tricked the Yiddish trickster in this brief but wonderfully alive-and-kicking biography. The story she tells will entertain, appall, and fascinate both those who have yet to discover Singer and those who think they know him."
—Jack Miles, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of God: A Biography

Janet Hadda is the author of Yankev Glatshteyn and Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature. She is professor of Yiddish at the University of California, Los Angeles and training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute.

For more information contact our publicity manager, Chris Caldwell, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

The cover of Hadda's book features a color photo of Isaac Bashevis Singer, copyright Alex Gotfryd/Corbis

March 2003

LC: 2002075667
272 pp.   5 1/2 x 8 1/4

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Paper $19.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-18694-4
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ISBN 978-0-299-18693-7
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