WRITINGS ON YIDDISH AND YIDDISHKAYT, THE WAR YEARS, 1939-1945

Newly translated essays show Singer as a journalist and columnist.

Stromberg, translator and editor of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust, collects 25 intriguing, emotional pieces by the Nobel Prize–winning author (1903-1991). They were published from 1939 to 1945 in New York City’s Forverts, a Yiddish newspaper, during a period of great turmoil in Singer’s life. Stromberg argues that these key wartime pieces are “fundamentally different from almost everything published to date,” offering a bridge between his Polish homeland and his adopted country and insights into the Holocaust’s impact on Singer as he explored cultural and religious customs and practices. “What is Kabbalah?” from late 1940, led him to formulate broader “notions that guided Jewish spiritual life throughout times of great crisis.” In an essay from Sept. 7, 1941, Singer confronted Hitler’s antisemitism head-on. “When Hitler says that the existence of the Jews is a personal insult to him,” he writes, “he’s not pulling it out of thin air.” From 1943, “Religious Jews Say That the Current War Is the War of Gog and Magog” shows Singer’s ability to “consider current events in both pragmatic-historical and mystical-philosophical terms at once.” A March 1944 essay on the Jewish language urges Jews to collect and preserve their Hebrew texts, and others from the same year lament Jewish powerlessness and argue that “American Jews need the past to be directly connected to the present.” In December 1944, he penned “Yiddish Language and Culture Undergo Their Greatest Crisis in History.” As the war wound down in the second half of 1945, Singer turned to artistic topics, such as the portrayal of Jewish life in Yiddish literature, its absence in movies (“Hollywood silences our existence”), and, most importantly, the future of Yiddish literature. Stromberg promises more collections to come.

Sheds light on the early, developmental years of the young, passionate writer.