Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life by Janet Hadda New York:  Oxford University Press, 1997,  x + 243 pp., $27.50

Isaac Bashevis Singer had so many different names—and selves—that psychobiographer Janet Hadda must have felt she was writing the life of a multiple personality. Born in Poland on July 14, 1904, Yitskhok (or Itshele, as he was called) Singer was raised in a home that was characterized by the piety, learning, and abject poverty typical of Polish Jewry. His father, Pinkhos Menakhem, was a khosid, a follower of the Hasidic beliefs developed by Israel Baal Shem Tov at the end of the 17th century. Pinkhos Menakhem was ecstatic, mystical, joyful, and otherworldly, a religious figure who was more comfortable ministering to his congregation's spiritual needs than to his family's emotional needs. Singer's mother, Basheve Singer, née Zylberman, was intelligent but cold, morose, withdrawn, and given to depression; trapped by her gender, she was unable and unwilling to perform the duties of a rabbi's wife. The parents remained married despite their incompatibility. Their unhappiness seemed to be part of the legacy they bequeathed to their children. Singer's older sister, Hindele Esther, was afflicted with epilepsy and given to wild mood swings; his older brother, Israel Joshua (1893-1944), later became a distinguished novelist whose fame proved galling to his sibling rival.

Singer's formative years were spent on No. 10 Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, where he imbibed the rich Eastern-Europe Hasidic traditions and customs that would later dominate his stories. Two momentous events occurred in 1925: the publication of his first short story, “Af der elter” (“In Old Age”), which won a prize, and the decision to change his name to Yitskhok Bashevis, the name by which he was always known to his Yiddish readers. As Hadda notes, Bashevis is a matronymic, a surname that he created in order to distance himself from his father and his older brother, who was far better known as a writer. Nor was Yitskhok Bashevis the only