Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: ; November 21, 1902 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born, Jewish-American author. The Polish form of his birth name was Izaak Zynger and he used his mother's first name in an initial pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded to the form under which he is now known.[1] He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.[2] He won two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw[3] and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin village near Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. A few years later, the family moved to a nearby Polish town of Radzymin, which is often and erroneously given as his birthplace. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most probably it was November 21, 1902, a date that Singer gave both to his official biographer Paul Kresh,[5] and his secretary Dvorah Telushkin.[6] It is also consistent with the historical events he and his brother refer to in their childhood memoirs. The often-quoted birth date, July 14, 1904 was made up by the author in his youth, most probably to make himself younger to avoid the draft.[7]
His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj. Singer later used her name in his pen name "Bashevis" (Bathsheba's). His elder siblings—brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944) and sister Esther Kreitman (1891–1954)—were also writers. Esther was the first in the family to write stories.[8]
The family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva. After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the family moved to a flat at 10 Krochmalna Street (in the spring of 1914 the Singers moved to No. 12)[9] in the Yiddish-speaking poor Jewish quarter of Warsaw, where Singer grew up. There his father acted as a rabbi — i.e., judge, arbitrator, religious authority and spiritual leader.[10] The unique atmosphere of pre-war Krochmalna Street can be found in many of Singer's works.

World War I
In 1917, because of the hardships of World War I, the family split up. Singer moved with his mother and younger brother Moshe to his mother's hometown of Biłgoraj, a traditional Jewish town or shtetl, where his mother's brothers had followed his grandfather as rabbis. When his father became a village rabbi again in 1921, Singer went back to Warsaw, where he entered the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary and soon decided that neither the school nor the profession suited him. He returned to Biłgoraj, where he tried to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons, but soon gave up and joined his parents, considering himself a failure. In 1923 his older brother Israel Joshua arranged for him to move to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the Literarische Bleter, of which he was an editor.]

United States
In 1935, four years before the German invasion and the Holocaust, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States due to the growing Nazi threat in neighboring Germany.[12] The move separated the author from his common-law first wife Runia Pontsch and son Israel Zamir (b. 1929), who instead went to Moscow and then Palestine (they would meet in 1955). Singer settled in New York, where he took up work as a journalist and columnist for The Forward (פֿאָרװערטס), a Yiddish-language newspaper. After a promising start, he became despondent and felt for some years "Lost in America" (title of a Singer novel, in Yiddish from 1974 onward, in English 1981). In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann (born Haimann) {b. 1907 – d. 1996}, a German-Jewish refugee from Munich whom he married in 1940. After the marriage he returned to prolific writing and to contributing to the Forward, using, besides "Bashevis," the pen names "Varshavsky" and "D. Segal."[13] They lived for many years in the Belnord on Manhattan's Upper West Side.[14] In 1981, Singer delivered a commencement address at the University at Albany, and was presented with an honorary doctorate.[15]
Singer died on July 24, 1991 in Surfside, Florida, after suffering a series of strokes. He was buried in Cedar Park Cemetery, Emerson.[16][17] A street in Surfside, Florida is named Isaac Singer Boulevard in his honor. The full academic scholarship for undergraduate students at the University of Miami is named in his honor