Shosha

Poland, Warsaw, the 1930s. The air is saturated with troubling premonitions of a global catastrophe. Aaron Greydinger is a young writer, the son of a rabbi, living a bohemian lifestyle. Getting tangled in romantic entanglements and creative failures, he tries to write a mystical play and, along with the other Warsaw Jews, waits for the inevitable end of the world. One spring day, while walking through the poor Jewish quarters of his childhood, he decides to visit the house where his first love lived—whom he hasn’t seen for twenty years. It turns out Shosha had been waiting for him all these years, and, as if by magic, she preserved the same look of a simple, trusting girl… The novel “Shosha” is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s best-known work (1902—1991): an astonishing love story and a vivid testimony to the life of prewar Warsaw, erased by the Nazis from the face of the earth. After the English version was published in 1978, I. B. Singer received the Nobel Prize for “the art of emotional storytelling.” Originally, the text appeared in Yiddish under the title “Soul Expeditions,” but during translation into English it was significantly altered and revised by the author, who later insisted that translations into other languages be made precisely from the English version. In this edition, “Shosha” is presented in a classic translation from English by Nina Brumberg.