Isaac Bashevis Singer – författare

An ALA Notable Book and winner of the National Book Award for Children's Books, Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Day of Pleasure shares his memories as a boy growing up in Warsaw, Poland prior to World War II--featuring striking black and white photographs by Roman Vishniac.In this series of short stories, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author reveals his childhood as part of Warsaw's Hasidic Jewish community in the early years of the twentieth century, through the First World War and into the 1930s before the Nazi Holocaust destroyed their culture. From his school days when his parents struggled with poverty in the ghetto through the divide between traditionalists and those determined to modernize their lives to the wars and fascist regimes that made them flee their home, Singer's stories and Vishniac's photographs recreate a world long gone but never forgotten.

Like Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction, this poignant memoir of his childhood in the household and rabbinical court of his father is full of spirits and demons, washerwomen and rabbis, beggars and rich men. This rememberance of Singer's pious father, his rational yet adoring mother, and the never-ending parade of humanity that marched through their home is a portrait of a magnificent writer's childhood self and of the world, now gone, that formed him.