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ISAAC SINGER: WRITER FOR CHILDREN Sylvia W. Patterson "What's life, after all? The future isn't here yet and you cannot foresee what it will bring. The present is only a moment and the past is one long story. Those who don't tell stories and don't hear stories live only for that moment, and that isn't enough" The character who speaks those lines echoes Singer's own beliefs about the value of storytelling. Isaac Bashevis Singer, known primarily for his adult fiction which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, began in 1966 to write for children. Over sixty years old at the time, Singer was convinced by his friend and co-translator, Elizabeth Shub, that the world he wrote about for adults would be of interest to children. Singer's world is primarily that of a Jewish ghetto in Poland in the first third of the twentieth century. It is a world where God and angels are much in evidence but so are demons, devils, witches, goblins, and hobgoblins waiting in dark hallways; it is a world where imps live behind stoves or in cellars and befriend both humans and animals; it is a world where humans and animals show great compassion for one another; it is a poverty-stricken world filled with hardships, but it is a just world too where rabbis settle disputes according to the ancient writings of the Talmud. It is a world which Singer feels he can best describe in Yiddish; later he and, ususally, Elizabeth Shub translate his works into English. Since 1966, Singer has published fourteen works for children. (A fifteenth , The Power of Light : Eight Stories for Hanukah, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) These works are quite varied as to the age groups who might enjoy them and as to their subject matter. One is classified as easy fiction: Why Noah Chose the Dove (1974). Two are retellings of tales: Elijah the Slave : A Hebrew Legend Retold (1970) and The Wicked City (1972) , a child's version of the destruction of Sodom. A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a_ Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1969) is autobiographical and won for Singer in 1970 the second National Book Award ever given for children's literature. Three of Singer's works were runners-up for the Newbery Medal; two were short story collections, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1967) and When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories (1969), and the longer work was The Fearsome Inn (1968) . Other works for children include Maze! and Shlimazel; or, The Milk of £ Lioness (1967), Joseph and Koza; or, The Sacrifice to the Vistula (1970), Alone in the Wild Forest (1971), The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (1971), The Fools of CheIm and Their History (1973), NaftaIi the Storyteller and His» Horse, Sus, and Other Stories (1976), and A Tale of Three Wishes (1976)7* As for the creative impetus behind this canon, I believe Singer has been successful largely because he practices what he advocates for writers, he has great respect for his audience, and he is a skilled craftsman. The creative principles which Singer always mentions in interviews and which he himself follows are, first, to write about what one knows about. He confesses that he has tried his hand at writing about things he knew little about, but ultimately he returns to his Jewish heritage and Polish background. In fact, Singer has said, "the more a story is connected with a group, the more specific it is, the better it is"; and, further, the writer should feel that he is the only one who can write that particular story: "The real writer manages to put his seal on his work." If there is a problem of "incompatibility of traditional Jewish materials and vernacular literatures," Singer solves it, in the words of one critic, "simply, by ignoring it." A second principle Singer observes is that the story is what is most important; he says: In our times storytelling has almost become a forgotten art. It is only in juvenile books that a writer still has to tell a story, not discuss social changes or psychological...

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