The Penitent

From Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Penitent is a novella about Joseph Shapiro, a disillusioned and aimless Holocaust survivor. After his rapid climb to prosperity in the United States, he soon plunges into promiscuity and subsequently flees to Israel in order to find salvation – discovering a purpose to his life through the Jewish faith. Following his journey as he flees Nazi persecution in Poland in 1939, through wealth and a failed marriage in New York, and his entry into the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, the book charts Shapiro's transformation from worldly confusion to spiritual certainty in traditional Judaism. This powerful work is an examination of the nature of faith, the question of identity, and the notion of how to lead a good life.

"The success of the book is its own resistance to temptation, the refusal to highlight the bad in Shapiro and play down the good. Singer reserves judgment for an authority other than his own. . . . [Singer's] parents, he said once, 'considered all secular writers to be heretics, all unbelievers.' Singer's honest and compassionate book, with its own complex hero, is a powerful response to the charge." — Times Literary Supplement