Love and Exile

From pre-World War I Warsaw to the New York of the 1930s, Isaac Bashevis Singer traces the early years of his life in this autobiographical trilogy. In the first volume, he remembers his bookish boyhood as the son of an Orthodox rabbi, equally absorbed in science, philosophy, and cabbala. Later, the pursuit of women came to obsess him almost as much as the pursuit of knowledge, and he chronicles the intricacies of his first love affairs. When he emigrated to the United States from Poland on the eve of World War II, though, loneliness and depression overwhelmed him, and he relives those dark years herein. From beginning to end, Love and Exile sheds new light on Singer's own life and the fictional lives mirrored within it.