First Steps in Literature: The Early Writings of Yitskhok Bashevis

Yitskhok Bashevis’s (1903–91) early works remain essentially unknown. These works, published in Yiddish journals and anthologies in Poland between 1925 and 1936, include short stories, sketches, critical essays, book translations, and an unfinished autobiographical novel. Just a few works, including his first novel, Satan in Goray (1935), and a few stories (Singer 2022), have appeared in English translation. Yiddish scholars have contextualized the early writings as an integral part of interwar Polish Yiddish literature (Roskies 1996), influenced by his older brother I. J. Singer’s naturalism, subverting Bergelson’s impressionism (Wolitz 1982; Sherman 2013; Yungman 1985), and a bio-bibliographical context (Stromberg 2021). A collection of Bashevis’s early short stories published in Warsaw Yiddish journals was scheduled for publication by Kletzkin Farlag in the late 1920s, but Bashevis terminated the arrangement. This article’s reconstruction of this crucial decision is based on Bashevis’s unpublished life writing (Varshavski 1956, 1963–65), archival material (Singer and Telushkin archives, Harry Ransom Center), and the writer’s critical essays. The article argues that Bashevis charted a new artistic direction in the stories “In the World of Chaos” (1928) and “The Jew from Babylon” (1932) and that his early fiction (1925–32) contained the seeds that would blossom in his iconic storytelling.