The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer kicked off the 24th New York Jewish Film Festival, a 16-day event showcasing the diversity of the Jewish experience around the world. Directed by Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser, the film explores the celebrated Nobel-prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer via the mostly unknown and yet vital sources of his creative inspiration—his legion of translators.

[Related: U.S. Debut of ‘Isaac Bashevis Singer’ & ‘Felix and Meira’ Bookend 24th NY Jewish Film Festival]

Dozens of women throughout Singer’s life worked with him to open the doors to his singular Yiddish prose for the rest of the world to enjoy, and his relationships with many of them blurred the lines between the professional and the personal. This is their story, and his—as well as a story of the arts of literature, translation, love, and life itself.

FilmLinc spoke with Galay prior to last night's U.S. premiere of the film, which launched the 2015 Jewish Film Festival, presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Galay talks about how he discovered Singer's muses and their crucial part in shaping his work.

FilmLinc: How did you discover this aspect of Isaac Bashevis Singer's working life and the women who helped craft it?

Asaf Galay: I've always been a huge fan of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I've been reading his stories all of my life. I started to notice that at the end of his stories, there were always different names of women who served as his translators. I thought to myself, “This is interesting.” And one time I started to count how many female names I could find who worked as his translators. I counted 48 of them. So I decided that I needed to find the story behind these names.

FL: How did you go about tracking them down?

AG: I found their names out of the Yellow Pages, Google, etc. But because I started late, almost 25 years after Singer died, [a number of them] had died as well. Out of that group, I found over a dozen to interview. Many were very young when they first met him, maybe in their twenties. They were not professional translators. Meeting with him changed their lives. Many had become professional translators, screenwriters, or playwrights. That's how they became connected to literature and it was in many ways because they met with this great man.

FL: Why do you feel he went for unknown writers to be his translators? Of course there's an element of attraction on Singer's part. But were there other reasons?

AG: Yes. His [early translator] was Saul Bellow who did Gimpel the Fool in English. He thought that it wasn't a good idea to have a prominent writer be a translator of his stories because they could [overshadow him]. It was also of course important that translators knew both Yiddish and English. Sometimes when you write a series for a paper or other publication, the characters need to be relatable to the various audiences…

FL: At what point when you were meeting with the various translators did you realize there was this underlying sexual component to their relationships with Singer?

AG: In the end it was the energy from the conversations that tipped me to this more complex story. During the meetings, they simply divulged new information.

FL: His second wife, Alma Wassermann, who was a German-Jewish refugee from Munich, had married him in 1940. How did that dynamic work?

AG: I think that she simply accepted his other relationships as long as she was the “number one wife.” He took her to the big events he attended. She also had connection to his estate. She was for him the domestic foundation. For him, she was also his protector. But really for him and for the continuation of his writing, the translators served as inspiration. He took some of their stories and gave his [spin] on them in his work. It was very important for him to see through them the new challenges and experiences of the new Jewish-American generation. And they provided that outlet.

FL: From the standpoint of the translators, what was his appeal? Obviously he was a celebrated writer, but what beyond that made him so alluring to so many women?

AG: In 1983, McCall's magazine did a list of the top 10 sexiest men in the United States. There were many actors and the usual  people like sports figures etc., but among them was also Isaac Bashevis Singer. They said he's so passionate and when he speaks, he's hypnotic. They said his energy gives the feeling you can walk to the moon… It was really important for me to understand his charisma so I wanted to meet everyone who had met him. He was this dynamo who was also a bit devilish. In the writers' world he was a late bloomer. He started at around 35, but around 45 he began writing a lot. In the 30 years of writing he did, it's amazing to see how much he did end up writing, including essays and lectures. Five or six years before he died, however, he began suffering dementia. He won the Nobel Prize, but by ’83 and ’84 he could no longer work.