Of a World That Is No More

Israel Joshua Singer was born in Lublin province, and was the brother of Esther Singer Kreitman and Isaac Bashevis Singer. He traveled to Moscow in 1918 but returned to Warsaw in 1921, where he became— along with Peretz Markish, Melekh Ravitch, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and others—a member of the expressionist group Di Khalyastre. Singer worked as a European correspondent for Forverts from 1924 and settled in the United States in 1934. The last of his European novels, Yoshe Kalb, was successfully adapted for the stage in New York. His novel The Brothers Ashkenazi, published in 1936 in Yiddish and in English translation, became representative of the pessimistic view of Jewish culture (traditional, socialist, or Zionist) in a hostile East European environment, whether tsarist or Soviet.