The Washwoman
This short story was written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904-1991, Jewish-American novelist and short-story author in the Yiddish language. Son of a provincial Hasidic rabbi, he moved to Warsaw in the early 1920s and became associated with the city’s Yiddish literati.
He lived since very little in a humble side of Warsaw, very important cultural center and Jewish spirituality. He related a lot of his experiences of his childhood in different books.
During the WWI, his family experimented the beginning of economic difficulties, he, his mother and brother went to Bilgoray, at the Austrian border. In that place started studying the Talmud and after a few years, he started interesting for readings very far from the Orthodox Judaism.
He decided to write in Yiddish because he said that “It is the language that has more words for a poor”. His first novel was published in 1935, the same year he went to the United States. He was leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement and won the Nobel Prize in 1978, the only time that it was given to a Yiddish writer. He is the most known Yiddish writer around the world. He won two US National Book Awards. His words when he won the Nobel Prize:
His genres of writing were: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Literature & Fiction, and Science
And his influences were: Aaron Zeitlin, Sholem Aleichem, and Knut Hamsun
10 Quotes from Isaac Bashevis Singer:
1. When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.
2. Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.
3. Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.
4. The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
5. The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him and give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.
6. When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
7. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
8. A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is full of surprises.
9. Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
10. The waste-paper basket is the writer's best friend.
This occurs in the early 20th Century at Poland. By this time, the world was passing through a difficult time, because the World War I left a lot of disaster, poverty, vandalism, fear, sadness, and loneliness.
My expectations about the reading, just by the title, I will say that I expect a story about a woman that washes the clothes of other persons, and because of the comment of the teacher, that if we don't cry….I think it is going to be a sad story.
Realism is the time that the story was lived, but the story was written in the Post Modernism.
Written in the United States, the story took place in Poland Nonfiction-Narrative Essay: Is a short piece of information that tells a story of a real person or a real event. This short story is based on real people, it tells a story about them.
When I read the story, I could notice that is about a woman that washes the clothes of the narrators and the author family, when he lives in Warsaw, Poland. In this story, the author and the narrator is the same person. Isaac expresses that he likes his mother and the washerwoman, but he dislikes the washwoman son. There are a lot of qualities to admire the washwoman like her sense of duty, her strength, that she is kind, she is honest, her sense of duty. In the other hand, the attitude of her son is bad, he is ashamed of her, he doesn’t take care of her, he doesn’t invite her to his wedding, at the end of her life he only send the money for her coffin. He was a rich person and he let his mother being a washwoman until her last day of life.
With first-person narration, it tells a story about a washwoman who used to do washing for his family. Thin and small as she was, this washwoman possessed a strength that came from generations of peasant ancestors. She lived alone; her son ashamed of his mother and never coming to see her. She was a poor and an old woman, maybe she could ask for money or entered in a home for the penniless and aged. But she has a great sense of duty and her pride.
The washing work in that times was very hard, the washwoman went to each house to pick the clothes, then she went to pick up the water from a pump, then she washes it and because of the insecurity in that times and the thieves, she went upstairs to the attic. Then she folds the clothes and takes it back to each house. This work takes more or less two weeks.
For me, de detail that moves the story along is "She tottered under the bundle of clothes". I could imagine that scene of an old woman, sick and carrying all that clothes... it could be my grandmother, my mother or even me...
Even dough she was so sick, she couldn't rest at all because of the quote that explains that she would come back with the laundry "I could not rest easy in my bed because of the wash".
In conclusion, the story is a real story, a sad story. But also a story of strength, hard work, effort, tenacity, responsibility. I think that the washwoman is an example for all of us in different ways, being responsible, but also for knowing when to stop because we can't lose our lives because of the work.
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