Jewish American literature, I. B. Singer, short fiction, immigration, lostness, assimilation, the Holocaust

This essay explores how Singer?s emigration to the United States marked his writing. Since Singer?s work is extensive, the paper focuses on his short fiction set in America, examining the differences between these stories and the stories set in Eastern European shtetls and Jewish ghettoes in large Polish cities. Singer?s mother tongue was Yiddish; he never gave the language up, and even in his ?American? short stories he remained faithful to the domain of Yiddish culture (while at the same time transgressing it); in view of this fact, Singer?s Americanness has certain boundaries, reflected in his characters? lostness, dislocation and uprootedness in the New World. This paper attempts to answer the question to what extent the American critic Leslie Fiedler was correct when he asserted that Singer was incapable of assimilation into American culture. It attempts to provide an insight into Singer?s oscillation between the world of tradition and Western modernity.