The easily disoriented title character of ''Shlemiel the First'' sets out on a multiyear sojourn, only to return to his town a few hours later. The musical bearing his name, Robert Brustein's slight but pleasurable adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's folk tales, has seen a lot more of the world. It made a brief New York appearance in 1994 before...
Inna Hecker Grade, the widow and a translator of the great Yiddish novelist and poet Chaim Grade, who earned her own literary niche for her zealous guardianship of her husband's legacy, died on May 2 in the Bronx, where she lived. She was 85. The cause was diverticulitis and congestive heart failure, said Bonnie Gould, the Bronx public...

The setting is a shtetl. The protagonist is a man beset. The vehicle is a musical. But the new show at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan isn't ''Fiddler on the Roof,'' based on the short stories of Sholom Aleichem. It is ''Gimpel Tam,'' based on a simple yet profound short story, known in English as ''Gimpel the Fool'' and written by Isaac...
Isaac Bashevis Singer (21. november 1902 - 24. juli 1991) var en jødisk forfatter, som skrev på jiddisch. Han boede det meste af sit liv i USA.
Isaac Bashevis Singer var søn af en rabbiner og bror til forfatteren Israel Joshua Singer. Han voksede op i et fattig jødisk kvarter i Warszawa, sidenhen i Rusland. I 1935 immigrerede han til USA, hvor han begyndte at arbejde som journalist.
Hans noveller og romaner kredser ofte om problemet, som opstår i mødet mellem den gamle jødiske verden og livsopfattelse og den nye tid med materialisme og manglende tro. Novellen "De små skomagere" er et ypperligt eksempel. Mødet mellem gammelt og nyt finder man også i roman-trilogien Familien Moskat, som var medvirkende til, at Singer fik Nobelprisen i litteratur i 1978.