Isaac Bashevis Singer

What do the names D. Segal, Yitshak Varshavski, and Yitshak Bashevis have in common? Each is a pseudonym for the writer and Nobel laureate more widely known as Isaac Bashevis Singer. Prompted by the frequent requests for help of readers and researchers in the Dorot Jewish Division of The New York Public Library who were hunting for the original Yiddish versions of Singer's stories and novels published in translation, and seeing a need for an updated bibliography of Singer's works (David Neal Miller's Bibliography of Isaac Bashevis Singer only covered Singer's works through 1949), author Roberta Saltzman compiled this survey of Singer's works from 1960 through his death in 1991. The text is divided into three sections, each arranged alphabetically. Section A lists Singer's contributions to the Yiddish newspaper press; each entry includes the Yiddish title exactly as it appears in the original, an English translation of the title, and an indication of the pseudonym employed. Section B consists of Singer's works published in Yiddish in book form, while Section C lists all of Singer's works translated into English and published in book form. Brief biographical information on Singer, including his childhood in Poland and his immigration to America, is provided in the introduction. A must-have for readers, students, and scholars of Yiddish and of 20th century world literature, this volume marks the eagerly-awaited first appearance of Saltzman's identification of 11 full-length Singer novels and 11 novellas, untranslated from the Yiddish and unknown, a discovery hailed by the New York Observer as long ago as 1996 as providing "perhaps the literary find of the decade."

Roberta Saltzman is the assistant chief librarian of the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library.