Most of the stories in A Day of Pleasure are taken from the autobiographical memoir In My Father’s Court (1966), to which Singer has added five new stories, including the introductory piece, “Who I Am.” Singer’s other autobiographical books are A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light (1976), A Young Man in Search of Love (1978), and Lost in America (1981). These have been collected, but without their accompanying illustrations, in Love and Exile: The Early Years (1984), which contains a new introduction, “The Beginning.” Related fiction includes the novel Shosha (1978), which tells the full story of Isaac’s boyhood girlfriend, and “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” which was adapted to the stage in 1974 and to film in 1983. The movie version featured Barbra Streisand in the leading role. Several other stories by Singer have been dramatized, and PBS has aired a film supported by the National Endowment for the Arts of his return visit to the Brooklyn boarding house in which he lived when he first came to the United States. Several of his stories and novels in Poland have been filmed, such as The Magician of Lublin (published in 1960; filmed in 1979), in which Alan Arkin stars as the irreligious and adulterous magician who becomes a saint after his wife commits suicide on his account.
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