ANALYSIS

        THE DAY I GOT LOST
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Biography 

(November 21, 1902 - July 24, 1991) Was born in Poland under military partitions by the Russian Empire. 

Was a Polish-born jewish writer. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pswudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded.He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish.  Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, also awarded two U:S: National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memjoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other stories (1974).

Singer's first published story won the literary competition of the literarishe bletter and garnered him a reputation as a promisig talent. A reflection of his formative years in "The Kitchen of literature" can be found in many of his later works. Singer published his first novel, Satan in Goray, in installmjents in the literary magazine Globus, which he had co-founded with his life-long friend, theYiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin in 1935. The book recounts events of 1948 in the village of Goraj, where the jews of Poland lostathird of their population in a wholesale attack by Cossacks. It explores the effects of the seventeenth-century faraway false messiah Shabbatai Zvi, on the local population. Its last chapter imitates thestyle of a medieval Yiddish chronicle. With  a stark depiction of innocence crushed by circumstance, the novel appears to foreshadow coming danger. In his later work, the slave (1962, Singer returns to the aftermath of 1648, in a love story between a jewsh man and Gentile woman. He portrys the traumatizedand desperate survivors of the historic catasthople with even deeper understanding.

Singer had many literary influences, besides the religious texts hestudied, he grew up with a rich array of jewish folktales and wordly Yiddish detective stories about "Max Spitzkopl" and his assistant "Fuchs". He read Russian, including Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment at the age of fourteen, wrote in memories about the importance of the Yiddish translations donated in book-creates from America, which he studied as a teenager in Bilgoraj: 

Of his non.Yiddish-contemporaries, he was strongly influenced by the writings of Knut Hamsun, many of whose works he later translated, while he had a more critical attitude towards Thomas Mann.

Singer always wrote and published in Jiddish. His novels were serializaed in newspapers, which also published his short stories. He edited his novels and stories for their publication in English in the United States, these versions were used as the basis for translation into other languages. He referred to his English version as his second original. Many of Singer's stories and novels have not yet been translated.

                                                                 
                                                               Signature

Historical Background

In 1935, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States. The move separated the author from his first wife Runia Pontsh and son Israel Zamir (1929-2014);they emigrated to Moscow and then Palestine. The three met again twenty years later in 1955.

Singer settled in New York City, where he took up work as a journalist and columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper. After promising start, he became despondent and for some years fell "Lost in America" (title of his 1974 novel published in Yiddish, published in English in 1981)

In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann (1907-1996), a German-Jewish refugee from Munich. They married in 1940, and their union seemed to release energy in him, he returned to prolific writing and to contributing to the forward. In additionto his pen name of "Bashevis", he published under the pen names of "Warszawski". They lived for many years in the Belnord apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

In 1981, Singer delivered a commencement address at the University at Albany, and was presented with an honorary doctorate.

Singer died on July 24, 1991 in Surfside, Florida, after suffering a series of strokes. He was burried in Cedar Park Cemetery, Emerson, New Jersey. A street in Surfside, Florida is named Isaac Singer Boulevard in his honor. and so is a city square in Lublin, Poland. The full academic scholarship for undergraduate students at the University of Miami is also named in his honor.

                                                                      
                     
                            Singer's bench in Bilgoraj


 Expectetion/Prediction about the text

This story is about his own life as an emigrant and how he felt in a strange city.

Singer is living in Europe and he is running away for the war. He separated from his family and doesn't know what to do. As a Jewish he has not options, he only can hide and try to stay alive.

He go by ship to other country, alone, desperate, and he doesn'T have place to live, he feels lost.

Some people help him and he feel better, he miss his family but he has to continue. He writes  to find his life again.

Analysis or connection between literary work and historical background

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote this story in first person. Narrator, professor Shmeliel was an absentminded professor who always forgot and lost his things.

He wanted to go to his home but he forgot where he lived, was in a cab in New York city. The taxi driver dropped him off at a derugstore so he could look up the address, he was unable to find the addres  and he tried to call some friends but they were wating him at his home because was his birthday celebration.

That day was rainning, and he forgot his umbrella somewhere. Suddenly, he saw a big black dog, was wet. Professor was lost and the dog too, had forgotten where he lived. They were standing there when a friend who was in a cab as a passenger, recognized him and stopped, he was on his way to professor's home for the party, he gave to professor and his new friend a ride to his house. Professor named the dog "Bow-Wow".

This story is related to the historical background by the place and time that Singer lived in New York city. 

Literary Movement

Realism

Realism is a literary movement that developed in the middle of the 19th century in France and then spread throughout the rest of Europe, and then to the United States. 

Realist writers wrote about regular folks, ordinary lives and drama. Some of these writers were reacting against the Romantic movement. Realist writers, unlike the Romantics, like to focus on groups of people. They give us the big picture: a panorama of a village, a city, or a society. 

Country 

New York City, United States.

Genre 

Short Story.

About my predictions    

My predictions were wrong because the story was not about the author's life. but the story occurred in New York city during the years that Bashevis Singer lived there.

References   

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Libros y biografía del Autor

Ontecnia Media Networks S.L.. Uruguay 11,504 (Valencia, España) 2017

Shmoop University (2017) Realism. USA. Recuperado de: http.www.shmoop.com/realism/