Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was one of the most famous representatives of Yiddish literature and a laureate of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. In his works, he touched upon various periods of life of Eastern European Jewry yet some topics interested him constantly since they stemmed from the experiences of the twentieth century. Those were obsession with ideologies and demons; the justification of God who allows the unchangeable to happen; ethical co-existence with others, animals in particular; and a choice not to cause harm.

This volume introduces to the readers the novels that help understand the scope of Singer’s genre diversity. The Slave (1962) is a historical novel, which depicts the suffering of a Jewish man, Jacob, who becomes a slave of the peasants in the Carpathians after the Khmelnytsky pogroms that had been fatal to his family. Shosha (1978) is an autobiographical novel on the writer’s life in Warsaw between the world wars, a life divided between the traditional culture of his isolated community and international modernism.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Раб. Шоша = The Slave. Shosha / trans. Yaroslava Strikha. – Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2020. – 512 p. 

ISBN 978-966-378-773-2

The book was published thanks to the support of the Association of the Jewish Organisations and Communities (Vaad) of Ukraine.