Shosha, A Novel Hardcover – January 1, 1978
by Isaac Bashevis Singer 
 
Set in Warsaw, in the period leading up to the Nazi invasion of Poland, Shosha is Isaac Bashevis Singer's ode to the beloved city he left in 1935. The story centers on a young Yiddish writer, Aaron Greidinger, who is caught between the fast-paced life of an emerging literati, with its many love affairs and philosophical frustrations, and his yearning for the irretrievable past – embodied in the figure of Shosha: a developmentally challenged young woman with whom he was in love as a child. The book gives voice to the anxiety of the coming war and an internal conflict between a desire for a pure past, and a fall into the existential absurdity of modern life – in which thrills are abundant, values no longer hold, and society is hurtling toward total upheaval. Originally appearing serially in Yiddish in 1974 under the title Soul Expeditions, Shosha was first published in English translation in 1978, the year Singer received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American author of short stories, novels, essays, cultural criticism, memoirs, and stories for children. His career spanned nearly seven decades of literary production, at the center of which was the translation of his work from Yiddish into English, which he undertook with various collaborators and editors. Singer published widely during his lifetime, with nearly sixty stories appearing in The New Yorker, and received numerous awards and prizes, including two Newberry Honor Book Awards (1968 & 1969), two National Book Awards (1970 & 1974) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1978). Known for fiction that portrayed 19th-century Polish Jewry as well as supernatural tales that combined Jewish mysticism with demonology, Singer was a master storyteller whose sights were set squarely on the tension between human nature and the human spirit.

“Singer celebrates the dignity, mystery, and unexpected joy of living with more art and fervor than any other writer alive. He is concerned with all the major themes, with good and evil, belief and doubt, action and contemplation, the nature of illusion and the joys of the flesh.” – Newsweek

“In Shosha, Singer captures the exquisite human drive for pleasure and transcendence that continues even in the face of certain doom. In this expressive and remarkable novel, the originality and sheer charism of Singer’s characters are stunning as are the author’s insights into humanity.” – Fig Tree Books Reviews

“Shosha is a haunting, rather than a novel. Singer begins with a disconcerting Irony, ‘I was brought up in three dead languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish.” This ironic statement functions as an invocation of those who spoke the Yiddish of Poland. He invites us to a séance to hear their voices.” – The Guardian

Cover design and illustration: Yanai Segal

Shosha is the first title in Isaac Bashevis Singer: Classic Editions, a new series that makes his best-known works available for new generations of readers. Future titles include The Slave, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy and Other Stories (including Short Friday), The Collected Stories, and Stories for Children.
 
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