Yiddish Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger
born July 14?, 1904, Radzymin, Pol., Russian Empire
died July 24, 1991, Surfside, Fla., U.S.
Polish-born U.S. writer of novels, short stories, and essays.
He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. After publishing his first novel, Satan in Goray (1932), he immigrated to the U.S. in 1935 and wrote for the Jewish Daily Forward , a Yiddish newspaper in New York. Though he continued to write mostly in Yiddish, he personally supervised the English translations. Depicting Jewish life in Poland and the U.S., his works are a rich blend of irony, wit, and wisdom, flavoured distinctively with the occult and the grotesque. His works include the novels The Family Moskat (1950), The Magician of Lublin (1960), and Enemies: A Love Story (1972; film, 1989); the story collections Gimpel the Fool (1957), The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), and A Crown of Feathers (1973, National Book Award); and the play Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1974; film, 1983). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.