![]() ![]() And his parables seemed, to his newfound American audience, startlingly apposite to the morally ambiguous world ushered in by World War II, even as they evoked, as in a dream, a time and a place the war had brutally obliterated. In his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Singer conjured parables of Old World demons and holy fools. ![]() Yet the fictional world he created spoke movingly to the fears, longings, and ambivalence about assimilation of modern Americans. His writing drew on East European Jewish folk memory and mystical traditions, and on a shtetl culture that was worlds away from the glare and blare of postwar America. He was born in Poland and wrote virtually all his work in Yiddish, even after he immigrated to the United States in 1935 at the age of 30-yet he lived in New York City for more than 50 years and set many of his stories there. ![]() What makes a writer an American writer? The accident of his birth or perhaps the circumstances of his exile? His language? His themes? His audience? The works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the seventh American citizen to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, raise these questions in fascinating ways.
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