Israel Joshua Singer ( Yiddish: ישראל יהושע זינגער; November 30, 1893, Biłgoraj, Congress Poland — February 10, 1944 New York) was a Polish-Jewish novelist who wrote in Yiddish. E nel corso di tutto il romanzo, un'intolleranza verso gli ebrei, accusati ingiustamente, ingiuriati, indesiderati. Israel Joshua Singer has been the subject of numerous English scholarly articles. In 2006, Delphine Bechtel offered a comparative view of Singer’s representation of the Jews of Łódź in The Brothers Ashkenazi. I've never been to Lodz but I knew something about its sudden growth largely due to a now bygone textile industry.

The elder brother of Nobel-celebrated Isaac Bashevis Singer, I.J. Singer wrote The Brothers Ashkenazi after successfully emigrating from Eastern Europe to New York in 1934. The novel was published two years later. For pre-Shoah, European Yiddish literature, it was a change for an author to move readers away from introspective Shtetl-tales. Instead, Singer thrusts his characters into a sweeping modernist narrative. Certainly, he is more comfortable writing about historical implication and social politics; at times, the protagonists seem so emotionally detached from one-another, that the reader will struggle to feel any empathy at all. Yet the prose is precise, daring and even witty and playful. Passages that may appear mundane are sprung to life through scathing satirical humor: Yes, he hated his father, and along with his father, he hated his holy books that spoke only of pain and were steeped in morals and melancholy; his Torah, so complex and convoluted that it defied all understanding; his whole Jewishness that oppressed the human soul and loaded it down with guilt and remorse.But most of all Nissan hated his father’s God, that cruel and vengeful being who demanded total obeisance, eternal service, mental and physical self-torture and privation, and the surrender of all choice and will. The more one compares these two writers, the more one sees in each of them. From this perspective Clive Sinclair’s book has many useful things to say. It is especially good in the first chapter, which recounts the early life of the Singer family by collating the accounts of Bashevis and Joshua, in their respective memoirs, with the forgotten autobiographical novel by their sister Esther Kreitman, entitled Deborah. (Sinclair has recently written an introduction for a new English edition of this book.) The author elegantly traces the autobiographical roots of characters, situations, and themes in each of the brothers’ work, and in later chapters points to the abiding concerns of each by comparing telling details of their fiction. Jewish philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein used the occasion of the novel’s reissue to offer a more extensive meditation on the different political, religious, and cultural sensibilities embedded in the brothers’ fictions. She presents I.J. Singer as a “harshly unsentimental realis[t]” in contrast to Isaac Bashevis Singer, the nostalgic idealist, even suggesting that I.J.’s pessimism was the driving force behind his choice to immigrate to America (although she frames I.J.’s youthful political choices as naïve and idealistic). She also argues that The Brothers Ashkenazi’s thematic treatment of fraternal rivalry makes it ironic for scholars to compare the two brothers’ work.The Brothers Ashkenazi is a historical novel that provides a literary rendering of the industrial revolution, political upheavals, and social conflicts in the Polish city of Lodz in a time spanning from the second half of the 19th century through to the first quarter of the 20th century. The story is told from the perspective of the Jewish community by following the life stories of two brothers, Max and Jacob. A very powerful story has been seized upon by a very powerful story-teller...Singer has a stirring gift of narrative; he always writes with verve, sometimes with intensity; his book has magnitude and color and, as it were, a consciousness of its weighty theme.” There are three main characters in Brothers: twins Simha Meir and Jacob, and the city of Lodz. Simha and Jacob are a kind of Cain and Able in the story and Lodz is the catalyst for constant change. From birth Simha is clever and grasping. A boy with a businessman's brain and a conman's heart. Jacob is handsome and popular but a bit dim and unfocused compared to his brother. Their father is a hard working and deeply religious man. He lives his life for God and his Rabbi. His only wish is for his sons to value piety over prosperity but the family fortune mirrors the secular fortunes of Lodz.

Altra similitudine: Simcha Meyer Ashkenazi è la fotocopia di Beppino Scacerni detto Coniglio Mannaro. Anzi, è possibile che Bacchelli, per creare il suo personaggio, si sia almeno in parte ispirato da qui. Immenso affresco non solo - e non tanto - di una famiglia ebrea, di due fratelli gemelli oppposti in tutto tranne che nel destino, quanto di un'epoca e una nazione che ha visto la nascita, la crescita e la morte, dell'industria tessile polacca, per mano della manovalanza e della imprenditria ebraica. La descrizione dei movimenti sindacali, della rivoluzione bolscevica in Russia, della prima guerra mondiale. Da togliere il fiato Questo sarebbe il titolo che darei alla fine a quest’opera che non avrei mai immaginato mi riuscisse a prendere e a far riflettere tanto. Quali medicine avrebbero potuto sanare una vita sprecata e mal spesa? In che cosa poteva trovar rifugio per consolarsi di un completo fallimento?"

La storia seppur romanzata, delle lotte della classe operaia e delle prime organizzazioni sindacali (figure indimenticabili e nobili quelle di Nissan e di Teveyeh, i pensatori idealisti, fondatori delle prime organizzazioni sindacali, indomiti, inesauribili, infaticabili ed indimenticabile pure l’immagine della figlia di Teveyeh sulle barricate). I don't think it's a coincidence that I.B. Singer's first published novel ('Satan in Goray') is set in 17th century Poland and revolves around religion while I.J. Singer's debut ('Steel and Iron') is set in 20th century Russia and very political. Sullo sfondo seguiamo l’evoluzione della guerra in cui, vinti o vincitori, si trovano uniti dal comune elemento della rabbia, che viene abilmente diretta da coloro che sarebbero stati i veri responsabili, e che avrebbero dovuto pagare per questo, verso gli ebrei che diventano il capro espiatorio perfetto per tutti e in qualsiasi situazione, con la devastazione dei pogrom, soprattutto quando questi permettono di portar via le ricchezze accumulate. I therefore regarded this mysterious I.J. Singer as an old fashioned and not that successful Yiddish novelist who helped his younger brother to sharpen up his own style and - perhaps - played a part in introducing him to the literary circles of first Warsaw and then New York.