爱情与信仰——评I·B·辛格的《肖莎》.pdf

Introduction Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 — 1991), the author of dozens of books, is widely considered the foremost contemporary Yiddish writer and a prominent post-war American Jewish fictionist. In his life Singer had won a lot of awards and honors, such as Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978; and Gold Medal for Fiction from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989. Singer was born into a pious, orthodox Hasidic family, his father being a rabbi and his mother the daughter of a rabbi. He at a young age received a basic Jewish education preparing him to become a rabbi, and he was made to read many religious books. However, an even stronger influence than his education and his parents’ orthodoxy was his elder brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer, who broke with the family’s religiousness and began to write secular stories. Later Isaac Singer also decided to become a secular writer instead of a rabbi. Singer was the only contemporary Yiddish writer to have achieved international recognition. Somehow he succeeded in breaking out of the closed circle of Yiddish literature and in attracting widespread interest to his wild and imaginative novels and stories. Singer first lived in Warsaw and other places of Poland and, before the Second World War, he emigrated to the United States. Although he had lived in America since 1935, and he was excellent in English, he kept writing exclusively in Yiddish for several decades. With a few exceptions, Singer wrote about Eastern European Jewryhis novels and stories frequently set in the Polish Jewish shtetls or ghettosas it existed between the mid-seventeent