Best Selling Books by Isaac Bashevis Singer

THE STORY: Set in the 1950s on Manhattan''s Upper West Side, MESHUGAH is a tragicomic portrait of a community of recent Jewish émigrés living in the wake of the Holocaust. When Aaron Greidinger, a struggling novelist and advice columnist, falls in l

The vanished way of life of Eastern European Jews in the early part of the twentieth century is the subject of this extraordinary novel. All the strata of this complex society were populated by powerfully individual personalities, and the whole community pulsated with life and vitality. The affairs of the patriarchal Meshulam Moskat and the unworldly Asa Heshel Bannet provide the center of the book, but its real focus is the civilization that was destroyed forever in the gas chambers of the Second World War.

The Penitent is the story of Joseph Shapiro, a disillusioned and aimless man who discovers a purpose to his life through the Jewish faith. Following his journey as he flees Nazi persecution in Poland in 1939, through wealth and a failed marriage in New York, and on to Israel, it charts his transformation from worldly confusion to spiritual certainty in orthodox Judaism. This powerful work is an examination of the nature of faith, the question of identity and the notion of how to lead a good life. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature ''Singer is a writer of far greater than ordinary power.'' The New York Times

Gimpel The Fool to The Letter Writer.

Herman Broder, a refugee and Holocaust survivor, has three women in his life: Yadwiga, the loyal Polish peasant who hid him in a hayloft from the Nazis; Masha, his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife. Unsure of who he really is, what he wants and whether he can ever find peace, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of paranoia and impending doom. Published in 1972, Enemies, A Love Story is an astonishing novel that blends humour and pathos to create a rich, humane portrayal of a man who cannot escape his past. ''One is forever suspended between laughter and tears by this rich and marvellous novel.'' The New York Times ''Isaac Bashevis Singer is a rare pleasure . . . a literary genius.'' San Francisco Chronicle Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

A Jewish refugee who escaped Hitler''s Holocaust and is living in New York with his second wife faces a dilemma when he discovers that his first wife is still alive.

Love and Exile contains the three volumes of the Nobel Prize Winner''s spiritual autobiography, covering his childhood in a rabbinical household in Poland, his young manhood in Warsaw and his beginning as a writer, and his emigration to New York before the outbreak of war, with the concomitant displacement of a Yiddish writer in a strange land.

In an age of darkness Poland lives under the iron fist of Krol Rudy until their leader, returns with the knowledge of an outside civilised world.

The Manor and The Estate—combined in this one-volume edition—bold tales of Polish Jews in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time of rapid industrial growth and radical social change that enabled the Jewish community to move from the ghetto to prominent positions within Polish society.

From the Upper West Side to Miami''s pastel resorts, "Shadows on the Hudson" traces the intertwined destiny of survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

This a selection of forty-seven stories chosen by the [Nobel-Prize-winning] author from eight prior collections [1957-1981].

"Shosha "is a hauntingly lyrical love story set in Jewish Warsaw on the eve of its annihilation. Aaron Greidinger, an aspiring Yiddish writer and the son of a distinguished Hasidic rabbi, struggles to be true to his art when faced with the chance at riches and a passport to America. But as he and the rest of the Writers'' Club wait in horror for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, Aaron rediscovers Shosha, his childhood love-still living on Krochmalna Street, still mysteriously childlike herself-who has been waiting for him all these years.

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.

Singer''s late novel, a magical and resonant fable, recreates the birth of the Polish nation. Through the compelling figure of Cybula, defeated leader of a tribe of hunter-gatherers, it explores the moment when prehistory dissolved into history, superstitions became tinged with skepticism, and men began to turn from many gods towards one god.

When their wishes fail, three children learn that they must deserve by effort what they had wanted to get too easily.

A Hebrew legend translated from Yiddish.