Love and Exile: Penguin Modern Classics

Born in 1902, Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up among fellow Jewish families in Poland. In response to the growing Nazi threat in neighbouring Germany, Singer emigrated to America. Settling in New York, he worked as a journalist for a Yiddish-language newspaper, The Forward. Singer was insistent that even after the Second World War, a wide audience remained for Yiddish texts, and each of his novels were originally written in his native language. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Since Singer's death on July 24 1991 his name has been used in honour for a street in Surfside, Florida, and for the full academic scholarship for undergraduate studies at the University of Miami.

From pre-First World War Warsaw to the New York of the 1930s, this title traces the early years of the author's life. It presents his bookish boyhood as the son of an Orthodox rabbi, equally absorbed in science, philosophy and cabbala. It chronicles the intricacies of his first love affairs.