IJ Singer; Volume 1: 1927-1937

As one of the most well-known Yiddish writers of the twentieth century, Israel Joshua Singer produced an impressive opus - presented in three volumes in Collected Works - in which he tackles religious, social, and political challenges facing the Jewish people. Unabashedly critical, he does not offer substitutes for what he views as failed ideologies, instead seeing the writer's role in the honest expression of and engagement with this inescapable predicament. This volume contains Singer's first three novels, Steel and Iron (1927), Yoshe Kalb (1932) and The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936). Steel and Iron, his first novel, is a graphic condemnation of existing spiritual and political ideologies, in which the inhabitants of the novel find themselves fleeing from physical and psychic dangers. In Yoshe Kalb, Singer explores questions of identity and addresses what he saw as infertile ground for Jewish life. The Brothers Ashkenazi traverses over a century of cyclical rises and falls of Lodz, with the fate of the city and that of twin brothers pointing to the physical and spiritual instability of Jewish lives in Poland.… (more)