Both his older siblings, sister Esther Kreitman (1891–1954) and brother Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), became writers as well. Esther was the first of the family to write stories. The family moved to the court of the Rabbi of Radzymin in 1907, where his father became head of the Yeshiva. After the Yeshiva building burned down in 1908, the family moved to Warsaw, a flat at Krochmalna Street 10. In the spring of 1914, the Singers moved to No. The street where Singer grew up was located in the impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter of Warsaw. There his father served as a rabbi, and was called on to be a judge, arbitrator, religious authority and spiritual leader in the Jewish community. The unique atmosphere of pre-war Krochmalna Street can be found both in the collection of Varshavsky-stories, which tell stories from Singer's childhood, as well as in those novels and stories which take place in pre-war Warsaw. In 1917, because of the hardships of World War I, the family split up. Singer moved with his mother and younger brother Moshe to his mother's hometown of Biłgoraj, a traditional shtetl, where his mother's brothers had followed his grandfather as rabbis. When his father became a village rabbi again in 1921, Singer returned to Warsaw. He entered the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary and soon decided that neither the school nor the profession suited him. He returned to Biłgoraj, where he tried to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons, but soon gave up and joined his parents, considering himself a failure. In 1923, his older brother Israel Joshua arranged for him to move to Warsaw to work as a proofreader for the Jewish magazine Literarishe Bleter, of which the brother was an editor. In 1935, four years before the Nazi invasion, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States. He was fearful of the growing threat in neighboring Germany. The move separated the author from his common-law first wife Runia Pontsch 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 ( פֿאָרװערטס), a Yiddish-language newspaper.
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