Singer’s oeuvre is deeply rooted in the Polish-Jewish past his favorite settings are Warsaw and shtetlekh in the Lublin region.

A number of his Yiddish works have never been published in book form and never translated into English. Singer often used supernatural characters and motifs, and some of his best works are short stories in the form of monologues both by human and demonic narrators. Most of his novels and stories take place in Poland in various historical periods, starting with pre-Christian times and ending with the outbreak of World War II, but there are also novels with an American setting for example, Enemies: A Love Story (1966 Sonim, a geshikhte fun a libe, 1978), and Shadows on the Hudson ( Shotns baym Hodson, serialized in Forverts in 1957), published posthumously in 1998. In the mid-1960s he started writing stories for children. His collections of stories include Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957 Gimpl tam un andere dertseylungen, 1963) and the autobiographical In My Father’s Court (1966 Mayn tatns bes-din-shtub, 1979 Mayn tatns bes-din-shtub: Hemsheykhim-zamlung, 1996). Among his most important novels are The Family Moskat (1950 Di familye Mushkat, 1950), The Magician of Lublin (1971 Der kuntsnmakher fun Lublin, 1979), The Manor (1967), and The Estate (1969)-serialized in Forverts in 1953–1955 as Der hoyf. He also used the pen names Yitskhok Warshavsky and D.

Der sotn in Goray), was serialized in 1933 in Warsaw in the Globus magazine and appeared in book form in Warsaw in 1935 (first English edition in 1955), the year in which Bashevis immigrated to the United States, where for most of his life he contributed his fiction and nonfiction to Forverts, New York’s main Yiddish daily. He adopted the name under which he is now widely known in the 1950s, when he started his career in English. He was born Yitskhok Zinger but used the pen name Bashevis, derived from his mother’s name, to sign his works in Yiddish in order to distinguish himself from his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer (b. 1893–d. 1944), who was already an acknowledged writer in the 1920s when Bashevis made his debut. Isaac Bashevis Singer (b. 1904 –d. 1991) was a Yiddish novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and critic born in Poland, who after his immigration to the United States became famous due to English translations of his works.

The magician of lublin setting