ABSTRACT
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Poland in 1904 into a world of almost medieval Jewish orthodoxy which no longer exists in Europe, and of which there are only traces left in Israel and America. In 1935, Singer bade farewell to Poland, as well as to his mistress Ronye, their five-year-old child Yisroel, and his mother and little brother. One aspect of Singer's duality which Hadda presents very effectively is the paradoxical relation between his vegetarianism and what might be called his piggishness. Nothing shows better his severe dedication to his craft and his indifference to the idle winds of literary and political fashion than his decision to set his first novel, Satan in Goray, begun in 1933, in seventeenth-century Poland. The last chapters of Hadda's book trace the unraveling of Singer's literary integrity as he begins to reap the rewards of fame and fortune following upon the award of the Nobel Prize.
