Topic: Isaac Bashevis

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער) (November 21, 1902 (see notes below) – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish American Nobel Prize-winning author and one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin village near Warsaw in Congress Poland, which was then a part of the Russian Empire due to Partitions of Poland. 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). His elder siblings--brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893-1944) and sister Esther Kreitman (1891–1954)--were also writers. Esther was the first in the family to write stories.