Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Isaac Bashevis Singer, born Izak Hersz Zynger, was the last of the great 20th century authors in Yiddish. He was born in the village of Leoncin near Warsaw when Poland was still part of the Russian Empire. He died eighty-seven years later in Surfside, Florida, after having suffered several strokes. The Jewish orthodox family moved to the nearby town of Radzymin in 1907, and a year later they settled in the Jewish quarter of the town where his father, Pinkhas Mendl Menachem Zynger, was a Hasidic rabbi who was convinced that the Messiah would arrive in 1915, or 1916 at the latest. The Jewish quarter as it was before it was wiped out in the war features in many of Singer's stories.