Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1988
Born	Izaak Zynger (1902-11-21)November 21, 1902 Leoncin, Congress Poland
Died	July 24, 1991(1991-07-24) (aged 88) Surfside, Florida, US
Pen name	Bashevis, Warszawski (pron. Varshavsky), D. Segal
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Language	Yiddish
Ethnicity	Polish Jew
Citizenship	United States
Genre	Fictional prose
Notable works	The Magician of Lublin A Day of Pleasure
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature 1978
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Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער‎; November 21, 1902 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also 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).

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin village near Warsaw, Poland, under military partitions by the Russian Empire. A few years later, the family moved to a nearby Polish town of Radzymin, which is often and erroneously given as his birthplace. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most probably it was November 21, 1902, a date that Singer gave both to his official biographer Paul Kresh, and his secretary Dvorah Telushkin. It is also consistent with the historical events he and his brother refer to in their childhood memoirs. The often-quoted birth date, July 14, 1904 was made up by the author in his youth, most probably to make himself younger to avoid the draft.

His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj. Singer later used her name in his pen name "Bashevis" (Bathsheba's). Both his older siblings, sister Esther Kreitman (1891–1954) and brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), became writers as well. Esther was the first of the family to write stories.