Between Tradition and Modernity: Isaac Bashevis Singer

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course will trace the literary journey of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1993)—the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—from the small Polish village where he was born to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. For his American readers Singer represented a bridge between the Old World and the New, between religious tradition and American modernity. He seemed like a kindly old grandfather, telling jokes and feeding the pigeons on Broadway. But Singer was a controversial figure in the Yiddish literary world: critics considered him a sellout for winning commercial success with stories about sex, immorality, and the supernatural.