Isaac Bashevis Singer is a monument, a force to be reckoned with in the Yiddish and English literary worlds. Singer—widely known as "Bashevis"—won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, the only author to achieve the prize for Yiddish literature. He was born in the first decade of the twentieth century in Radzymin, an industrial suburb of Warsaw, Poland, to a Hasidic rabbinical family. Even after immigrating to the United States before the outbreak of the Second World War, Bashevis continued to write about Polish Jewish life in his fantastical and fanciful style.

This slide show offers up a variety of illustrations from the traveling exhibit Isaac Bashevis Singer and his Artists, on loan from the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York City. The exhibit, on view in the Yiddish Book Center's Brechner Gallery through February 15, 2012, showcases some of the seventeen artists who illustrated Bashevis's works with a range of styles, techniques, and media. Laura Kruger, curator of the HUC–JIR Museum, characterizes Bashevis as having a "genuine love of pious, superstitious, earthy, heroic, resourceful, and tragic figures" who, in turn, encounter "the harsh reality, fear, anxiety, and despair of surviving." All of these characters and themes appear somewhere in the body of illustrations that accompanied the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Images and captions in this online exhibit courtesy of HUC–JIR Museum and Laura Kruger, its curator.

• 

  Title:

  "Dance with Kerchief” from Satan in Goray (Streetwater Editions, 1981)

  Description:

  Ira Moskowitz, a friend of Bashevis, captured the bawdy, licentious, raucous, and supernatural aspects of personalities ravaged by harsh conditions and their own consciences.

  Credits:

  Ira Moskowitz

• 

  Title:

  “Had he seen the hand of God. He had reached the end of the road” from The Magician of Lublin (The Limited Editions Club, 1984)

  Description:

  Larry Rivers produced three illustrations for an edition of The Magician of Lublin, capturing the gravity of spiritual transformation inherent in the story. Reaching deeply into his own Jewish heritage, Rivers visually translated the dynamic tensions of the novel.

  Credits:

  Larry Rivers

• 

  Title:

  Cover for Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (Harper Collins Publishers, 1966)

  Description:

  Maurice Sendak, most famous for Where the Wild Things Are, illustrated two Bashevis works. In illustrations like the one pictured from Zlateh the Goat, a whimsical reality enables readers to embed themselves in the author's world.

  Credits:

  Maurice Sendak

• 

  Title:

  “Partisans in the Forest” from The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980)

  Description:

  Irene Lieblich, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, shared a mutually life-enhancing friendship with Bashevis. Her memories of village life captured—with joyous naïveté—the evocative landscape that was faithful to Bashevis's own recollections of the shtetl. He wrote, "Her works are rooted in Jewish folklore and faithful to Jewish life and spirit."

  Credits:

  Irene Lieblich

• 

  Title:

  Cover from The Golem (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982)

  Description:

  Uri Shulevitz captures sixteenth-century aesthetic sensibilities in his sculptural depiction of The Golem. Precise and haunting, Shulevitz's drawings intensify the haunting tale.

  Credits:

  Uri Shulevitz

• 

  Title:

  “This was Leibel’s nightmare” from The Fearsome Inn (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967)

  Description:

  The brooding, translucent quality of Nonny Hogrogian's work reveals the inner turmoil of the characters.

  Credits:

  Nonny Hogrogian

• 

  Title:

  “Bal Makane saw that he was trapped” from Alone in the Wild Forest (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971)

  Description:

  The pure joy and silliness found in all of Margot Zemach's illustrations reflect the Yiddish wit of Bashevis's stories.

  Credits:

  Margot Zemach

• 

  Title:

  “...she set her dogs on him and he barely escaped with his life” from The Wicked City (Harper & Row, 1972)

  Description:

  Leonard Everett Fisher's monumentally powerful "scratchboard drawings" extract the iconic, biblical elements of Sodom and Gomorrah in The Wicked City.

  Credits:

  Leonard Everett Fisher

• 

  Title:

  “ . . . and their nails were painted black” from The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (Harper & Row, 1971)

  Description:

  William Pène du Bois enhances Bashevis's fantasy tale, The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China, with delicacy, grace, and imaginative humor.

  Credits:

  William Pène du Bois

• 

  Title:

  “Cheder Boys, Carpathian Ruthenia” (ca. 1935-1938) from A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing up in Warsaw (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969)

  Description:

  The use of emotive photographs by Roman Vishniac jolts the viewer back to the stark reality at the source of Bashevis's storytelling.

  Credits:

  Roman Vishniac