Born in Radzymin, Poland, on July 14, 1904, in a long lineage of rabbis, Singer was one of four children. His parents were Rabbi Pincus Menachem and Bathsheba (Zylberman). Singer's young life in the Jewish shtetls of Poland was steeped in Hassidism. He was educated in the Jewish schools and at one time he was enrolled in a rabbinical seminary. When he was four, his family moved to Warsaw where his father, a Hassidic scholar, established a Beth Din (rabbinical court).

In 1917, Singer moved with his mother to his maternal grandmother, who lived in a small town. Here he learned about Jewish life in the shtetl, which would become a topic for his short stories and novels.

By 1926, Singer was writing book reviews and short stories. In 1932, he became co-editor of Globus, a Yiddish literary magazine. In 1935, he left his first wife, Rachel, and his son, Israel, to immigrate to America to join his older brother in New York City, where he became a freelance writer for the Jewish Daily Forward. Many of his novels were serialized in the Forward and, in 1950, his novel The Family Moskat was translated into English by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Singer became instantly famous and he received the Louis Lamed Prize. An Italian translation, in 1968, won him Italy's Bacarrella Prize.

After he divorced Rachel, Singer married Alma Heimann, a refugee from Germany. A vegetarian, he and his wife both loved living creatures and spent a great deal of time in the park feeding the birds.

Singer was a member of the I.L. Peretz Writers Union and a fellow of the Jewish Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America and the American Institute of Arts and Sciences. Singer, whose writings have been translated from Yiddish into Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Norwegian and Finnish, stands as a giant and legend of our Yiddish writers of our time.

Singer died on July 24, 1991, at the age 87, from a series of strokes.