Isaac Bashevis Singer

Born in Poland in 1903, Singer published first in Yiddish, carrying a literary tradition most assumed was fading. He moved to the United States and began translating his own novels and stories into English with collaborators, reaching audiences far beyond Yiddish readership. In 1970 his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw won a National Book Award in Children's Literature; in 1974 his story collection A Crown of Feathers won in Fiction. The Nobel Prize followed in 1978. Some works made it to the stage. He died in July 1991, having spent decades proving a minority la…