Scum
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Description
After the death of his seventeen-year old son, Max travels back to Warsaw, while his wife stays in South America. There he begins a series of affairs with different women.Tags
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Member Reviews
This was a weird one; engaging character study of one man and his most intimate thoughts - Singer does a great job of furrowing inside the brain of a man with dubious morals and a streak of selfish, brutish (and yet sometimes self-aware) misogyny. Portrays the see-saw motion of his consciousness and his struggles with his guilt (in the form of faith) with applomb. Ends too quickly, without much revelation, in a manner that doesnt feel intended. Still worth a read if interested in Jewish fiction.
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Author Information
380+ Works 23,886 Members
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) was the author of many novels, stories, children's books, and memoirs. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. (Publisher Provided) Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Radzymin, Poland on July 14, 1904. He received a traditional Jewish education, including training at the rabbinical seminary in Warsaw. He show more began writing in Hebrew while he worked for 10 years as a proofreader and translator in Warsaw. In 1935, he immigrated to New York, where he became a journalist for the Daily Forward, America's largest Yiddish newspaper. Most of his stories were originally published in this newspaper in serial form. His first novel, The Family Moskat, was published in 1950. His other works include The Magician of Lublin, The Spinoza of Market Street, The Slave, and A Friend of Kafka. A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw won the National Book Award for children's literature. He received numerous awards during his lifetime including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978 and the Gold Medal for Fiction in 1989. He died after suffering a series of strokes on July 24, 1991. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Keltainen kirjasto (256)
Gallimard, Folio (2487)
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Shoym
- Original publication date
- 1991
- Important places*
- Argentinië
- First words
- The Yiddish newspaper Max Barander bought that morning in Warsaw carried the same news he had read in the papers in New York and London: the Balkan peninsula was a powder keg; Purishkevich, the notorious pogromist, and other ... (show all)members of the Black Hundreds were busily destroying Russian Jews; the Jewish colonies in Palestine were suffering from a drought; in Argentina bureaucrats of the Jewish Colonization Agency were again making trouble for Baron de Hirsch's colonies; Kaiser Wilhelm had aroused fresh bitterness in diplomatic circles with his belligerent threats; and the Zionists were preparing for a new congress.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 839.0933 — Literature & rhetoric German & related literatures Other Germanic literatures - Yiddish Fiction 1860-
- LCC
- PJ5129 .S49 .S4813 — Language and Literature Oriental languages and literatures Oriental philology and literature Hebrew Other languages used by Jews Yiddish
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 272
- Popularity
- 118,072
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.77)
- Languages
- 8 — Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 18
- ASINs
- 3
