THE WAR YEARS, 1939-1945 is the first major effort to fill the gap between the Nobel laureate's Yiddish and English oeuvre. Knowing that a whole world, a whole way of life, a whole cultural treasure bound up with Yiddish and Yiddishkayt--that they were all going up in flames before his very eyes--was crushing for Singer, driving him to put pen to paper and write. His wartime writing--appearing in an intensely urgent tone--sought to record not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that was taking place at that very moment.