The Penitent
A Novel
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A provocative novel from Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, narrated by Joseph Shapiro, a disillusioned New York businessman who walks away from wealth, infidelity, and moral emptiness to embrace strict religious observance in Jerusalem. Framed as a confession told to a writer at the Wailing Wall, the novel is a searing indictment of modern secular life and a meditation on faith, guilt, and redemption. Both unsettling and deeply personal, Singer's narrative forces readers to grapple with uncomfortable questions about morality, materialism, and what it truly means to repent.
About the Author
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Yiddish-language novelist and storyteller who chronicled Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America with humor, mysticism, and moral depth. Born in Poland to a rabbinic family, he emigrated to New York in 1935 and wrote for the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) for decades. His novels, memoirs, and short stories give voice to the shtetl, the Hasidic court, and the world lost to the Holocaust. His characters, whether rabbis, skeptics, dybbuks, or ordinary people wrestling with faith and desire, embody the tensions between tradition and modernity at the heart of Jewish experience.
Singer received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” He won two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974) and Newbery Honors in 1968 and 1969. His Jewish literary honors include the Louis Lamed Prize (1950 and 1956) and Israel’s S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal (1975). The Jewish Book Council selected his novel The Slave for its Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award, the council’s top prize for English-language fiction of Jewish interest, in recognition of 1962 publications. A master of the short story, he is remembered for classics such as “Gimpel the Fool,” translated into English by Saul Bellow.