The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

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Magnificent and Masterful, Spirited and Profound

Wonderful storyteller

The Vanished Yiddish World Returns To Life

A lost world from the inside

One of the greatest short stories collections of all time

The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Singer, Isaac Bashevis | ( S ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
German | European | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0374126348

Book Description

The forty-seven stories in this collection, selected by Singer himself out of nearly one hundred and fifty, range from the publication of his now-classic first collection, Gimpel the Fool, in 1957, until 1981. They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.

Customer Reviews:

Magnificent and Masterful, Spirited and Profound.......2007-01-13

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a master storyteller and any reader will be well-rewarded for spending time with his "Collected Stories." Many of these stories are set in Poland before World War II or post-war New York City, but there is a spiritual energy that drives all of these tales, regardless of location. Old World demons and devils can be found in "The Unseen," "The Destruction of Kreshev," "Henne Fire," "Zeidlus the Pope," about the Devil tempting a Rabbi into becoming the Pope, and one of the collection's best, "The Dead Fiddler," about a would-be bride inhabited by dueling dybbuks. New World mystical forces are recounted in "Powers," about a man's seductive past, and "The Psychic Journey," about war breaking out during a writer's trip to Israel. Several stories involve survivors of World War II, among them "The Cafeteria," about a woman who imagines seeing Hitler in a New York City deli, and the unexpectedly heartbreaking "The Joke," about a practical joke taken seriously. Every story is deeply felt and richly detailed, including the more comic ones such as "Gimpel the Fool," "The Yearning Heifer," and "The Admirer," about a writer's fan disrupting his day. Choosing favorite stories in this collection is almost impossible, because they are all unforgettable, but ones that resonated most richly for me include "Taibele and her Demon," about a woman's mysterious night visitor, "The Little Shoemakers," about a family of cobblers who courageously survive two world wars, "The Manuscript," about a mistress who saves her lover's novel from destruction, and the transformative "A Crown of Feathers," about a young woman losing and then trying to regain her faith.

Wonderful storyteller.......2006-12-28

This is the first ive read of Bashevi Singers work but its sure aint the last.
Ive read quite a lot of the classics and more than a couple of the Nobel prize winners, but I can honestly say that I have a hard time remembering such joyous storytelling. Singer was amazing; it all seems so easy when he tells his stories; its almost like the stories flows from his pen.
The fact that the stories often stem from the culturally rich jewish community in Europe makes it even more interesting. We tend to forget today, that much of what we call art was carried at great length by that community, together with the russian.
Anyway...if we forget all this and center on the prose, i end up with the following recommendation:
If you want to read something marvellous, enchanting and extraordinary,
dont miss Singer.

The Vanished Yiddish World Returns To Life.......2005-09-17

This truly excellent collection of Singer's stories (all originally composed in the Yiddish language) are as colorful as the people about whom the stories were written. Here are tales of weddings, of jokesters, of happy occasions of all variety, of feuding farmwives, and of unrepentant fools. After reading through a handful of Singer's works, a person gets the feeling of how it must have been to live as a Jew in eastern Europe a hundred years ago. This was a culture rich in its traditions and lore, a people who loved life and kept their identity through good times and bad. Singer, himself born and raised in the region so many of his short stories describe, was one of very few authors I would unhesitantly dub "a human treasure".

A lost world from the inside.......2005-04-01

The greatest paragraph in all of Singer is the one at the beginning of his story, Shosha, where he says he knew two dead languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, and was educated to read about the cultic requirements of a temple which had not existed for 1900 years; he knew Yiddish which he considered perhaps not a language at all, and that although his ancestors had lived in Poland for five or six hundred years he knew only a few words of Polish, although he lived in Poland for all of his youth until he came to America.

Nothing says more about the unhealthy state of the Jews than this. Zionists should use this quote as the supreme justification for their idea that Jewish life in the Diaspora was very disfunctional and certainly unhealthy.

One of the greatest short stories collections of all time.......2004-07-19

Singer is one of the supreme masters of the short story. His stories are filled with incredible energy and life. Demonic lust drives many characters, and one of the reasons he is much loved is his seeming modern depiction of characters who come from the old world, the world of Jewish Poland . But the stories I most love are ones in which a power of beneficence overwhelms in some surprising way. The great Gimpel the Fool is one example of this, the story of the cuckold the eternal innocent and believer who knows once he stops believing in his wife he will stop believing in God and the goodness of the world. Another of these great stories is the Little Shoemakers with its tale of successive generations in old world and new continuing the family trade despite the loss and transformation in tradition time brings. Another of this kind of great story is the 'Spinoza of Market Street' with its revelation of an unexpected love. The list is long of very great and moving stories.Singer is a master- teller who can be stark and frightening at times but gives that sense the great writers' do , of life in literature as something deeply deeply meaningful. Who reads this book will taste life deeply and more deeply love it.

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a brilliant novel but no fun to read
A modern epic novel..eternal ..humorous and testimonial
Dark and Epic: Singer rewriting himself
Nowhere plans for nobody
A failure of imagination

Shadows on the Hudson
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Plume
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0452280036

Amazon.com

Although Isaac Bashevis Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1935, the circumscribed world of the Polish Jews remained at the heart of his imagination. Beginning with his first major work, Satan in Goray (1935), he used the life of the shtetl as raw material, transforming its folkways, religious practices, superstitions, and sexual habits into superior works of art. From time to time, however, Singer turned his eye upon New World Jews like himself, recording their rapid or reluctant assimilation into the American mainstream. One such book is Shadows on the Hudson.

This massive novel originally was serialized in the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward in 1957. Now it has finally been translated into English--in a capable version by Joseph Sherman--and Singer fans should be very grateful. Center stage is occupied by Boris Makaver, a master builder equally devoted to I-beams and the Talmud, and Anna, his much-married daughter. Fanning out from this duo, however, is a small universe of refugees, all of them served up with Singer's customary brio. (Here's a comical snapshot of a shyster named Hertz Grein: "His nose had a Jewish hook, but then had second thoughts and straightened itself out. His lips were thin, and his blue eyes revealed a curious mixture of bashfulness, sharpness, and something else that was hard to define. Margolin used to say that he looked like a Yeshiva boy from Scandinavia.") As the subplots pile up in an unruly heap, the novel sometimes reveals its installment-plan origins. Still, Singer puts his large cast through some wonderful paces, and the endless talk--for these are characters who truly come alive through the medium of rapid, contentious, Yiddish-accented conversation--allows the author to speculate about destiny, identity, and freedom without slowing his story a whit. As Singer said more than once, "Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?"

Book Description

Serialized in the late 1950s, Shadows On The Hudson was translated from Yiddish and published posthumously as a complete novel in 1998, receiving widespread literary acclaim. From the Upper West Side to Miami's pastel resorts, Shadows On The Hudson traces the intertwined destiny of survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer has created a vibrant, resonant, and provocative cast of characters in search of answers to life's greatest dilemmas, challenges, and ironies.

Customer Reviews:

a brilliant novel but no fun to read.......2006-10-13

Had it been published in English when it was written, shortly after WWII, it would have been ignored as the story of a mere milieu. Today it is the story of Everyman. These Jewish refugees in New York after the Holocaust, relatively prosperous since the truly poor had no means of escaping Hitler, display all the Angst, ambivalence, rootlessness and indecision of modern mankind. They cannot decide between reason and faith, modernity and tradition, America and Europe. Their God is no comfort and his non-existence no release. All that is real is Hitler -- and Hitler stands for what the modern world has to offer.

This novel is exasperating because it is always easy to despise the despicable characters it develops, yet reflection after each portion read forces one to admit a sympathy, albeit reluctantly. Very Dostoyevskian to be sure. Dostoyevsky is no pleasure to read either.

Singer deservedly got the Nobel Prize for Literature years ago and before this masterpiece ever saw the light of day except in Yiddish in serialized form.

A modern epic novel..eternal ..humorous and testimonial.......2006-06-18

Having been in jesuit school during my primary and secondary, I distintly remember a priest who told me I should marry a jewish girl for you have the sort of character that requires it.. he was not mistaken, but the unfolding of that story rivals a novel of IBS... so my wife gave it as a girft and I found a novel in some parts as to be similar to Dovstoyeski, yet modern is some others as Saul Bellow's.. and even humorous as Woody Allen.

Its a story of survivors, of the melting-pot phenomenom of the USA, of the drift of generations and the loss of traditions, of the eternal contradictions, and the difference between a world separated by the holocaust.

Dark and Epic: Singer rewriting himself.......2006-01-19

For fans of Singer's writing, there is little new here. All of his classical narrative concerns are on display. But this novel, unpublished during his lifetime, is far more of an immense and deep exploration of his concerns; there is the feeling, when reading this sprawling novel, that he has found yet another angle to explore his fictional concerns, and it is one that is subterranean in its aesthetic. Shadows is staggeringly dark; its vision of humanity, both in the past, present and future, is unremittingly tragic and sorrowful. Singer never lets up, and reading this novel can be fatiguing because of its unrelenting stance toward despair. What saves the novel from perdition, what makes it more than a catalog of gloom, is that it is uttering extremely simple truths, even if they are hard to swallow.

Nowhere plans for nobody.......2004-08-17

"Shadows on the Hudson" is an excellent novel, even better than Singer's similiar but more compact "Enemies, a Love Story". Few writers have ever been able to involve the reader in the inner lives of fictional characters the way Singer could, and fewer still would have been able to make their stories so fascinating when they're all so cynical and often downtrodden, bemoaning God's silence and the corruption of modern man. Singer had a singular talent for exploring the chasm between expectations and reality, how we're almost always let down (and the post-WW2 Jews moreso than practically anyone in history), and how, for some totally inexplicable reason, we keep going. He made the absurd palpable for the modern reader, far better than even Camus and Sartre did, because he was an entertaining storyteller first, and THEN he was a philosopher.

This long, convoluted story of the lives of a half-dozen Jewish intellectuals and businesspeople in New York immediately after the second world war must be Singer's masterpiece. He often explored the same ideas in his novels---the point of existence and the role of the Jew in modern society---and in fact he often used philandering husbands and bitter wives and mistresses as primary characters, but he pulled it all together here into a riveting, beautiful story of obsession, regret, pain, and penitence that you simply don't want to end. That these people, and their endless torturous questions, aren't really important in the long run is precisely the final point of Singer's big novel: we make a tiny, swift ripple in the river and then we're gone, possibly forever; but it is how we grapple with the desires of the body and the needs of the mind and heart that gives our lives substance and form. Without this questioning and searching, without this rending of our spirit by apparently random or viscious events in our lives...without all of it, we would never turn to God. And then our small lives ARE meaningless.

At least, that's what I think Singer is trying to say. In the end, he was a fantastic writer who drew you into the story and kept you guessing until the end. Just like life itself...

A failure of imagination.......2004-07-14

This book was serialized in Yiddish in 1957 and 1958 in the pages of the socialist and extremely anti-Communist Jewish Daily Forward. Reading it reveals that it is no surprise that it took four decades for it to be translated into English. The book deals with a handful of New York Jews, almost all of them refuges from Nazism, in the immediate post-war period. Although most of them are in reasonably comfortable circumstances, they are almost all deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, some of which they survived, while others lost their loved ones. At the same time the characters worry about the equivalent tyranny of Stalin at the beginning of the Cold war (a point Singer constantly reiterates) and how some of their relatives are becoming (uniformly stupid) Communists themselves. Into this depressing situation comes the love affair between Anna Luria, daughter of the wealthy, devout businessman Boris Makaver, and Hertz Grein, a former scholar and now a successful stockbroker. Both of the couple are married, and Grein also has a hysterical mistress that he cannot get free of.

So far, so interesting. But I am afraid the book is a failure. I can understand why Singer would be deeply pessimistic about Judaism and the fate of the world. But the tone is one of hysteria, and however reasonable that might be as a response, it is not successful literature. The essential ideology portrayed is that only absolute devotion to the narrowest and most rigid Orthodoxy can save modern Jewry. The only alternatives presented are the aforementioned stupid Communists, and the most nihilistic sort of atheism. Over and over again various characters state that a Just God could not allow this sort of suffering to His people, and that it would be better if He did not exist at all. But then they usually conclude that atheism invariably leads to the nihilism of totalitarianism, and that therefore the most rigid Orthodoxy is the only solution. Now granted, these characters are not Singer himself. And there are signs that he undercuts his character's Orthodoxy. It will not escape the reader that as Anna's and Hertz's relationship collapses it is Hertz who bemoans and wails his lot. But it is actually Anna who goes out of her way to rescue her father from his own poor financial judgement even after he denounces her as a slut. Meanwhile Grein is horrified that his children are both marrying Gentiles, and disassociates himself from them. He shows no interest when his daughter-in-law thinks about converting to Judaism. "I don't accuse others, only myself," he claims, though in fact he has denounced his daughter as a whore for sleeping with her boyfriend. One might think that an adulterer, who repeatedly betrays the three women he is involved with, could care more for his own children. At another point Grein goes to a synagogue and he comments on how much more generous and kind the congregants are to him, in a way that Zionists and Communists wouldn't. Later, however, he complains that the congregation is as selfish and envious as everyone else. His idealization of the old Polish shetls is undercut by Dr. Margolin's reminder that he lost five siblings to infant mortality. As the book concludes Grein claims his loyalty to Orthodoxy is absolute, even though he doesn't really believe in Sinai, or much else.

So one could think that Grein is neurotic and a hypocrite. But the fact that his perspective, repeated by several other characters, is the one that is endlessly reiterated throughout the novel can help drown out one's reservations about his conduct. The only time Jews collectively show any dignity in the novel it is at religious functions or in the company of the Orthodox characters. Elsewhere, whether it is on vacation, or in business, or at political meetings, or in the world of show business the characters are shockingly crass. Another problem is the repetitive quality of the book, whether it is Grein's conversations about religion or his contacts with his mistress. The constant condemnations of pornography, of violent movies, of pro-female alimony laws are repeated without any real detail or nuance or illumination. Were it not for the criticism of Hitler and the occasional vegetarianism, much of it could have been repeated by Al-Qaedya. There is also an anti-feminism in the book, which only supports Grein's sexual bad faith ("a woman is not governed by reason but by emtions, instinct, fashion, or plain stubborness, against which rational arguments do not avail"). And portraying Grein as the slave of passion subtly blurs his responsibility for his sex life. Certainly the picture of America which emerges is extremely unflattering: assimilation at its worst. There is almost no attempt to deal with Gentiles. Not only is there the tactless reference to an Afrrican-American whose heart, says the book, is supposedly still in the jungle. But the characters immediately think the worst of the Germans they occasionally run into. Most of Singer's work tended to ignore Gentiles, but you cannot write a novel about the aftermath of the Holocaust which assumes that the vast majority of humanity consists only of shadows.

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A delightful story, well presented, the basis for Michael Chabon's "Kavallier and Clay"

Jewish Mystical Story Telling at its Best

CLASSIC SINGER STORY, SUPPOSEDLY FOR CHILDREN

es la más bella versión del Golem que jamás leí

The Golem
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0374327416

Customer Reviews:

A delightful story, well presented, the basis for Michael Chabon's "Kavallier and Clay".......2007-07-14

The Golem, as told by IB Singer, is a traditional Jewish mystical short story of a superhuman giant, made of clay, who is brought to life by the most religious rabbi in order to save Jews in times of trouble. And although it is a "children's" story, there are many layers of symbolism to keep adults interested. This particular edition was especially well done. I appreciated the artwork and overall esthetic presentation of the book.

I came to this book after reading Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavallier and Clay, the "Clay" in the title being the last name of one of the main characters, but also the substance from which the rabbi made the golem. Chabon heavily alludes to and borrows from this story, the Golem of Prague, though never quite lets the reader know that this is what he's referring to, almost assuming that the reader already knows about it, which is for most people not the case. So it was especially rewarding to finally read the story.

Jewish Mystical Story Telling at its Best.......2006-07-20

This seeming children's story is really a parable for adults (which children can enjoy and eventually get on another level when they are ready). There are many well crafted sentences about the spiritual life, how to surrender into trusting God to take care of your life, about the hidden saints who help our life on Earth work, how to use our free choice, how to live in community with others, how to relate to believers and nonbelievers, how to handle being falsely accused, and how to be humble with power. You can taste a whole way of life behind the story which might be worth living or open it at random and find some messages that relate to challenges we meet in daily life.

CLASSIC SINGER STORY, SUPPOSEDLY FOR CHILDREN.......2005-02-09

The Golem is one fo the best known Singer short stories. Its theme is a Golem, a mythical figure imbued with life by cabalistic magic to help the Jewish people in a time of need.

This story begins with persecutions on Jews in Prague, which is when the Golem is sent to Reb Leib. After helping the Jews in their objective, Reb Leib decides to use the Golem, with its incredible strenght, for a less noble pursuit, which is when the Golem starts to disobey him. The story unfolds with the Golem, a creature made of clay, turning more and more human, with the mauturity of a child but enormous strenght. The probelms mount as the Golem destroys all in his way, falls in love (reciprocatedly) and gets drafted by the emperor.

The short story evokes many deep issues, such as what it means to be human, what one should do with unending power, what one should do to preserve the peace, and many others. Though originally a childrens story, any adult would enjoy it. It is the type of story that leaves one reflecting about certain issues for days.

es la más bella versión del Golem que jamás leí.......1998-12-15

El Golem tiene todos los ingredientes que necesita un relato para funcionar, pero en este caso, además, está escrito por Singer. Esto significa que el cuento está bellamente narrado. Singer cuenta de manera simple aún las historias más complejas.

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want to know about a great book?
The Excitement of "Shosha"
One of Singer's Best
couldn't put it down
Shosha will never be written again.

Shosha: A Novel
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374524807

Book Description

Shosha is a hauntingly lyrical love story set in Jewish Warsaw on the eve of its annihilation. Aaron Greidinger, an aspiring Yiddish writer and the son of a distinguished Hasidic rabbi, struggles to be true to his art when faced with the chance at riches and a passport to America. But as he and the rest of the Writers' Club wait in horror for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, Aaron rediscovers Shosha, his childhood love-still living on Krochmalna Street, still mysteriously childlike herself-who has been waiting for him all these years.

Customer Reviews:

want to know about a great book?.......2007-07-17

Shosha is a great book by one of the leading authors of the 20th century. It is a beutiful love story with a difference.

The Excitement of "Shosha".......2007-02-09

The main character, Aaron Greidinger, is a writer, an intellectual, interested in a simple girl, Shosha Schuldiener, from his childhood. He's interested in many women--sexually, too--which occasions wonder how Hasidic or Orthodox Jews can admire the author. "You'll give her a few weeks of happiness, and then you'll abandon her", says girlfriend Betty Slomin about Aaron's interest in Shosha (84). This appeared accurate at that juncture. Look at the list. He has been having a long affair with the Communist Dora, a heavy woman. He has been sexually active with Celia, the wife of his friend Haiml and the girlfriend of Morris Feitelzohn. He is sexual and going around with Betty Slomin, the wife of Sam Dreiman, as she helps him with his playwriting. He is also making sexual advances toward the maid for his apartment, Tekla. And while all of this is transpiring, he is considering taking up again with his childhood girlfriend, Shosha. Singer's story, written in the late 1970s, is about a writer coping with sexual desires while writing a play. Singer probably designed this aspect of his character more for amusement than for reflecting any actual persons, including himself.

Greidinger moved from his childhood home to a second home during his adolescence to areas away from there, circling in and around Warsaw and the Yiddish writers around Warsaw. For 60 pages we watch a religious youth evolve into a secular writer and member of the Jewish intelligentsia, all without any help from the simple girl-woman Shosha. It's as difficult for us as it is for Betty Slomin, the wife of that affluent American, to fathom how he will develop a passion--and a commitment to--one woman at all, much less one simple, basic-looking woman, the woman for whom this whole novel is named. Subsequently, we find that he did, somehow. Somehow we are to believe that. He directly, artlessly informs her of his devotion. It is an aloof devotion for, despite all the exploratory discussion by this novelists' various intellectual characters, this character of his, this prominent writer, cannot ever seem to reach words to tell Shosha what it is he admires about her, what are her attractive qualities.

In fact, the writer remains as aloof toward her as he is toward the central questions vexing the people of his time. He appears more like a moderator in the intellectual discourse of his social milieu, and somewhat less than a concerned participant.

Aaron Greidinger, laconic, is mostly a neutral presence to the people about him, whom he, in fact, makes speak, for Greidinger is clearly just the author Singer, at an earlier time. So, Singer himself is neutral, for example, during the Dr. Feitelzohn and Mark Elbinger discussion of theology (142-145) when Greidinger says "I was not in the mood to take part in any discussions and I went over to the window." He is making the conversants there speak, and speak volumes, while he appears to not even move his lips, a silent listener, a ventriloquist. This subtle presence by the author characterizes almost the whole novel. In perhaps no other first-person narrated novel is the writer present as an indifferent listener, writing the dialogue of the other characters through an apparent ventriloquism.

The other characters are no dummies. "Strangely, Morris Feitelzohn could speak with ardor about the wisdom found in certain Cabbalist and Hasidic books. In his own fashion, he loved the pious Jew and admired his faith and power to resist temptation. He once said to me, `I love the Jews even though I cannot stand them. No evolution could have created them. For me they are the only proof of Gd's existence.'" (19) But Singer is not sure how and whether to accept them; he is more fascinated with them and performing the obligation of recording them for posterity.

Feitelzohn possesses his two opposite sentiments regarding the Jews as if they are the only group about whom he could feel this way. Well, didn't he ever hear of the Amish, the Protestant American evangelists, even the devout Moslem? On the basis of irony, any of those could be proof that Gd exists, no? Perhaps his statement is about him, for he could be read as saying, "For me, they are the only proof of Gd's existence", which renders his statement a little trivial.

Aaron Greidinger's play is not respected by the theatre cast and crew. In the hands of producer Sam Dreiman, an American businessman, and his self-preoccupied girlfriend Betty Slonim, with her constant remarks and criticisms, it is subjected to constant revisions, as well as additions by various performers, and then additions by the actors union demanding more performers, and then by the theatre owner himself. (Ch. 6)

The story of the production reminds Greidinger of the tale of a village taken possession by madness, in which roles have been switched. An idiot is released from an institution and rendered a university professor, and the university's professors are floor sweepers, and so forth (112).

Social critics in the Jewish newspapers during the runup to the Hitler invasion of Poland reject any play other than plays providing reflection on the crisis, as distractions. What, they asked, does a medieval girl, the main character in the play, "The Ludmir Maiden", doubly possessed, by the dybbuks of a whore and a musician, have in relation to contemporary problems?

The play is examined in a rehearsal, resulting in rejection by its own producer, who calls it a "crazy farce for insane cabbalists". He doesn't realize that the farce quality resulted from all the kaleidoscopic alterations contributed by the various performers, his own girlfriend, and he himself.

Greidinger follows up this explanation with a retraction. (Ch. 7, Sect. I) It is he who is to blame for the play's failure. He could have worked on it. He does not suggest how he could have coped with all the revisions others made. It is not an intimate revelation of his inner intentions, which Jesus and his followers might seek from repentants. He admits to committing sins of lethargy and distraction, without more. He has failed to carry out the mitvah of writing a play, as if it had been assigned to him by the Jewish Gd, and describing what he was doing all those months instead is all that seems necessary to him to tell the story. Instead of "working on the play", he did this and that. He went with Betty Slonim to museums and to "silly American movies", from which there was nothing to learn. He spent his free time with Shosha, and falling onto the bed with Tekla. But whether he could have done anything to counter the willful interference of all those who were determined to leave their imprimatur on "The Maiden of Ludmir" is, he feels, not worth addressing. He doesn't even let us readers know what he would have done, although he strenuously argues he would have done it. This disingenuous list of his sins in an afterword is politic and deferential, to make him appear humble, likeable. We enjoy the description of his distractions. We like someone who owns up to his responsibilities. But if we think about it, he isn't credible.

Singer supposes it's his attitude that we readers will remember, his appearance of humility, as we skim lightly over his expression of regret. After all, the soul is not its specific memories. So, why should we readers remember these specificities? In speaking about the soul, as distinct from the mortal body, Dr. Feitelzohn notes that if memories of lives are washed away, on the one hand, the soul that survives is not "the same", with which his conversant concurs, which, like much else in Judaic theology, is essentialist philosophy. (144) The question is posed, in the effort to reach an answer, What essence survives paring away of the memories? (It must be noted that the difficulties to this line of inquiry consist of its terminology.)

If the philosophy in "Shosha" is vague, the characters are crystal clear. As the characters are founded on real personas known to Singer, readers always know who is talking, even without attributions, because of their immensely different positions in his world. Thus, while Greidinger has several women friends, one is the wife of a playwright and highly critical and intellectual about art, the second is a Communist deeply immersed in political ideology and cynicism (Dora), one is so simple she was kicked out of elementary school (Shosha), and another is a Gentile Polish housemaid bent on politeness, gratitude for the zlotys, and emotional support. Singer's own Greidinger main-character writer is subdued. Few inner psychological elaborations to him mean he's also known by his words and actions; we wonder as much about the man thinking and speaking in all scenes as about his colleagues. There's no chance of confusing him with the writers, like Feitelzohn, in his commnunity. If Feitelzohn is mystical, Greidinger is straightly secular. If Dora is ideological, Greidinger is cynical and convinced that no political system will work and all is doomed. Hence, great drama attends any meeting of minds. Readers are at the edges of their seats attentive to what the one would say and how the other would reply. Their actions and words are logical deductions from the essential characters their creator gave them. What are they doing together in one room? is the question that the dialogue is designed to answer. Thus, a vigorous minded Greidinger is often befriending then marrying/consoling a simple, forgetful, inept, innocent Shosha. Thus, the quiet, economizing, humble Greidinger is often befriending Betty Slonim, loud, assertive, boastful, explicative, and self-absorbed. Perhaps relationships based on discrepancies so great are possible only in art, a three-dimensional art that obtains a reality all its own.

Singer is content to present his outstanding characters in an exciting plot. A resolution to the tension of the plot is not necessary to him, apparently. Either that or he was just not "in the mood" to writing its resolution. Emigration from Poland to escape the threatening German war machine is an underlying theme throughout the earlier part of the novel, and emerges later in the foreground when Aaron Greidinger's play fails. The participants and observers of the play excitedly discuss the political situation there. The narrative has proceeded linearly. The reader expects the main characters to change their minds and organize an escape. However, the narrative suddenly leaps ahead in a giant leap . . . to flashback, as an epilogue (262), and the narrative is looking back from over a decade after, leaving the reader to wonder why there was all that dramatic tension in the first place. It is perhaps this disappointment of a drama unfulfilled that scuttles the entire enlightening and artistically original novel to the dark corners of our bookshelves and has precluded it from university course readings on European literature.

One of Singer's Best.......2005-12-19

Singer writes an odd and completely compelling love story. I read this book every couple of years and always find it fresh and interesting. It has elements of the history of the Jews in Warsaw before the war but it's really a story about truth - truth in regards to yourself and truth in regards to learning what is really important.

Shosa is such a simple and plain girl without any ambition. She is completely unimposing and naïve yet, somehow, against her humble persona you feel that all your `important' troubles are just not that important.

I also like how Singer sets up a love affair that examines the clashing worlds of modern Jewishness: on one side is a progressive liberal intelligencia almost drunk with new ideas while on the other side is an age-old culture that remains immoveable in its ancient wisdom.

Great book that should be read and reread.

couldn't put it down .......2005-06-26

I found this sweet love story to be compulsively readable and its title character to be adorable. I'm not sure that I saw the profundity that other reviewers saw (except for the constant reminders that Jewish Poland was about to be destroyed).

Shosha will never be written again........2005-05-27

Several years ago while I was a student at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts I had the good fortune to hear Dr. Yehuda Bauer, perhaps the world's foremost expert on the shtetl. This is a vanished world that few scholars can discuss any longer and one of its most daunting demands is its formidable linguistic challenges. Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish and Russian are hardly the close cousins of English and its Romantic language roots. To delve into the few primary source materials that exist in this field is hardly a task for the faint of heart. Dr. Bauer knows more than ten languages and is able to navigate this terrain with expertise but as for the rest of us? I suppose I feel like John Keats when the Odyssey was translated for 19th century English readers. We are awaiting the entrance to an exhibit our wildest imaginations cannot apprehend or, for that matter, anticipate. Dr. Bauer can keep an interested audience spellbound by his intimate details of this vanished world and you realize when you listen to him that when he is gone a very valuable bit of history and tradition will be disappearing with him.

And so we have Singer. As a Jew, I know very well that there are elements of my ancestry that are beyond my grasp. Reading Shosha, there is a strange familiarity; not with the Polish names but with a Jewish sensibility that has been passed along to me by my family. If you are a Jew -an Ashkenazic Jew reasonably educated both culturally and religiously- there are fingerprints in this work you will think you've seen before. The Warsaw ghetto is filled with old Jewish men and women who live by the word of God, who spend each waking hour in devotion to tradition. This dedication separates them from the modernity surrounding them. Of course their Polish neighbors don't understand them, they are enraptured by gnostic texts that speak vividly of a world that dissipated long before the diaspora to Poland. This is a metaphysical realm not of ressurections but of divinations. There is no palpable realm of the messiah who will deliver Jews from their misery. It is within these texts that, one might argue, these Jews inhabit an apostolic and epistolary reality that makes sense only to them. And that world is not modern. The modern is to be held at arms length, to be suspected and apprehended but never assimilated.

Singer, writing from the United States, left this world before the Nazis moved in and obliterated nearly every last inch of it. The study houses of Warsaw did manage to come to New York, but they became artifacts rather than centers of Jewish thought. American Jews (even the most devout) became assimilated, praising American progress which was the "gift" of modernity. The gnostic, metaphysical realm of ethereal traditions would never assert itself in the lives of a majority of Jews again.

Why might Jews who read this text understand this? I would only wager that there is something in this suspicion of modernity, this over-the-shoulder regard of society that remains, like an inside joke, in the conscience of Jews. But non-Jews should not be turned away. Singer makes this esoteric world oddly accessible. His gift, in my eyes, is to take fumblers like myself, people who really couldn't navigate these distinct and undulant cultural waters and make us see the beauty in it. It is a universal beauty; a humor that speaks of the collective aspirations of a people who have had mostly cause for despair if not, on their best days, ambivalence about redemption in this life.

Read this book. It is a touching story whose sublimity is its tragic humor, it's acceptance of defeat as a pre-requisite for uncertain, unpromised, but still possible victory.

Five stars.

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Humor glinting at the edges
Great For Elderly Parents, Too
Share this world with a child
Just as magical as the Harry Potter books!
Maaaaaa says Zlateh

Stories for Children
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374464898

Book Description

Thirty-six stories by the Nobel Prize winner, including some of his most famous such as "Zlateh the Goat", "Mazel and Shlimazel", and "The Fools of Chelm and the Stupid Carp".

Customer Reviews:

Humor glinting at the edges.......2003-10-05

As Singer noted in his 1984 Foreword, "in the beginning was the Logos, the power of the word." He had never believed he could write for children, but editor Elizabeth Shub convinced him otherwise in the early 1960s. Twelve volumes of children's books followed, from which these 36 tales are gleaned. Young readers should remain eternally grateful.

This collection opens in Chelm, the village of idiots young and old. Even the people have funny names--Gronam Ox, Dopey Lekisch, Zeinvel Ninny, Shmendrick Numskull and Feyvel Thickwit. The way they speak and act is still funnier.

Gronam, for example, would have been a happy man, but for the elders who regularly visited--to whom he regularly spoke nonsense. His first wife Genendel would reproach him, to which he replied, "In the future, whenever you hear me saying something silly, come into the room and let me know. I will immediately change the subject."

She refused. "If they learn you're a fool, you'll lose your job as head of the council." Instead, each time he said anything silly, she offered to hand him the key to their strongbox. "Then you'll know you've been talking like a fool."

That year, the town met with a scarcity of sour cream, which was sorely needed for the coming Pentecost, a holiday on which the townsfolk normally ate a lot of it. Gronam had the solution. He proposed making "a law that water is to be called sour cream, and sour cream is to be called water." Given the wells full of water, he noted, all the women would have barrels full of sour cream as a result.

Sender Donkey, Treitel Fool and their most foolish compatriots all heartily approved. So the new law was written. But Genendel shortly appeared with the strongbox key. When Gronam explained their arrangement, the elders grew enraged. How dare a woman suggest she knew better when wisdom or silliness had been spoken.

They in turn changed another law: When Genendel believed Gronam's pronouncements silly, she should give the elders the strongbox key and let them decide. If they disagreed, she would double their portions of blintzes, cakes and tea. From that day forward, Gronam spoke freely, and Genendel hardly said a word: She was not about to serve blintzes generously.

Then there is Shlemiel, also of the fabled Chelm, and as fine a businessman as the town could offer. He married Mrs. Shlemiel, whose father gave him a dowry, with which he bought a goat in Lublin. But en route home, he left the goat tethered to a tree while he went into an inn for some brandy, chopped liver and onions and a plate of chicken soup and noodles. The innkeeper (not surprisingly) switched his old blind billy goat for Shlemiel's milking goat. Lots more fun and some Chelmnick wisdom followed.

Readers also encounter "Shrewd Todie and Lyzer the Miser." The former had a wife Shaindel and seven children and never earned enough to feed them. He had such poor luck working at trades that he decided if he should make candles, the sun would never set. During an especially cold winter, Shaindel told Todie that if he could not get something to eat, she would go to the Rabbi and get a divorce. "And what will you do with it," he asked her. "Eat it?"

Lyzer meanwhile was so stingy, he'd let his wife bake bread but once every four weeks: Stale bread was eaten more slowly than fresh. He left his poor goats to feast on his neighbors' thatched roofs, rather than feed them. He preferred to eat his dry bread and borscht on a box so that his upholstered chairs would not wear out. And he never made a loan, preferring to keep his money in his strongbox.

One day, Todie asked Lyzer to borrow a silver spoon, promising he would return it the next. Not one to doubt holy words, Lyzer loaned the spoon and was pleased the next day when Todie returned it, plus a silver teaspoon, explaining that the spoon had given birth. Todie was honest, and had to return both. He repeated the exercise twice more.

At last, Todie came to Lyzer to borrow silver Shabbat candlesticks, which Lyzer gladly loaned. Todie sold the candlesticks, bought his wife and seven children a feast and on Sunday, returned to Lyzer, reporting that his candlesticks had died. "You fool! How can candlesticks die," Lyzer screamed, dragging Todie to the Rabbi. "Did you expect candlesticks to give birth?" the Rabbi asked. "If you accept nonsense that brings you profit, you must also accept nonsense when it brings you loss."

Others stories are less silly. We meet Peziza the imp who lived with her friend Tsirtsur the cricket an old stove, where they shared gay, devilish, frightening, and delightful stories on long winter nights.

And Rabbi Leib, who escaped the evil works of Cunegunde, a witch whose son Bolvan robbed the merchants on the roads and hid his stolen hoard in an invisible cave--rendered by his mother's evil magic.

My favorite is "Zlateh the Goat." Rueven instructed his son Aaron to take his pet to the butcher to pay for the struggling family's Hanukkah feast. Heartbroken, the heartbroken boy heeded his father and set out, but was overtaken by a snowstorm. I cannot tell what happened, but the tale warms hearts to the core.

Like all Singer's work--these 36 agile stories offer spirit, life and the supernatural--with humor glinting at their edges. Children love them, be they young or old.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Great For Elderly Parents, Too.......2002-07-23

I sometimes read these to my sick and elderly dad at bed time. He loves them. When he's not doing well, is worried about his health, is afraid to close his eyes, the stories work their magic. As I read, he sometimes clucks, murmers "oh, yes," and makes other happy and endearing sounds--just great to hear. If he's still awake at the end, he goes to sleep, fearlessly, with a smile on his face.

Share this world with a child.......2001-05-30

Although this set of 36 stories is recommended for reading level 4 to 8 years old, Singer would rightly say that story tellers "write not only for children but also for their parents, they too are serious children." Singer considers children as the best readers of genuine literature, by nature inclined to mysticism, and with their own particular logic and clarity they rely on nothing but their own taste. With an array of supernaturral characters (devils, gnomes, hobgoblings, prophets, imps, saints, and demons) Singer fulfils a mosaic of fantastic imagination, colored by a rich folklore, addressing moral issues that concern the child and the adult as well. Stories such as "Zlateh the Goat," "Popiel and Tekla," "The Power of Light," amongst others, have a universal appeal because they address eternal questions. For Singer, now matter how young a child might be, he is a philosopher and seeker of God. An adult will surely enjoy these tales, and if he can share them with a child then his pleasure will be doubled!

Just as magical as the Harry Potter books!.......2000-05-19

Over the years I've read this book to my daughter several times. As most children, she has her favorites and never tires of those. You've got demons and witches and holy men who fight evil. You've got moral lessons that teach without preaching. All written with compassion and a deft hand. Adventure abounds. Excitement rules the day. You'll find yourself speaking with a Yiddish accent in spite of yourself! And, me, an African American woman! Good books know no color. Pure magic.

Maaaaaa says Zlateh.......2000-01-31

I had read Isaac Bashevis Singer in high school and enjoyed him. I picked up Stories for Children at the library and read it to myself straight through and found it very enjoyable. I thought my 4 and 5 year old might like it too so I read Zlateh the Goat since we're getting a lot of snow. You have to understand that basically the author has transcribed oral legend onto paper. It's the difference between reading Shakespeare and watching Hollywood doing Henry V. I have never so vividly experienced this as when I read the this story to the kids. They were rolling on the floor when the goat says Maaaa. At the end of the story the author ends one word short. Both kids shouted it out. I completely missed it when I read the book to myself silently.

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It is not very Polish
Gripping story of love, hate, and the eternal search for happiness
It's Polish - So of course it's good
brilliant evocation of a unique moment, yet with universal dilemmas
For love of God and wife

The Slave
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374506809

Book Description

Four years after the Chmielnicki massacres of the seventeenth century, Jacob, a slave and cowherd in a Polish village high in the mountains, falls in love with Wanda, his master's daughter. Even after he is ransomed, he finds he can't live without her, and the two escape together to a distant Jewish community. Racked by his consciousness of sin in taking a Gentile wife and by the difficulties of concealing her identity, Jacob nonetheless stands firm as the violence of the era threatens to destroy the ill-fated couple.

Customer Reviews:

It is not very Polish.......2007-10-01

Although it was written originally in Yiddish and not Polish, the book is about Poland in XVI century, seen with the eyes of a Jewish person right after World War II. The book itself is very meaningful: it shows every single community in a rather pessimistic light but it is quite accurate. Polish people, Ukrainian people, Jewish people: nobody escapes harsh commmentary. The story is very beautiful and it made me cry at the end. The author definetelly is trying to find answers to what happened to Jewish people during the World War II. The book is set in the times of Khmelnytsky Uprising against Polish-Lithuanian Common Wealth and not a Polish Revolution. Uprising was a rebellion of present day Ukrainians and included armies of Cossacks and Tatars. During the uprising Polish noblemen, Catholic priests and Jewish people were commonly eradicated.

Gripping story of love, hate, and the eternal search for happiness.......2007-01-16

I could not put this story down. The writing is vivid and engrossing in this compelling story set during an almost barbaric time in Polish history.

The Jewish, Christian, pagan undertones shape the story. The quest for love and happiness send the reader through many years of trials.

Highly recommended.

It's Polish - So of course it's good.......2006-05-21

Much like his predecessor Henryk Sienkiewicz, Warsaw-born Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) likewise won the Noble Prize in Literature. 'The Slave' is the first of his writings I have had the pleasure of reading and much like the other reviews reflect, I found it immensly enjoyable. I have read a great deal of Slavic fiction and I found this piece reminding me of other great works, in particular, Eliza Orzeszkowa's 'Meir Ezofowicz'. Similarly, it has the same romance and adventure you would find in Sienkiewicz's epic Triology and it's historically related. Sienkiewicz's 'Z Ogniem i Mieczem' (With Fire and Sword) is historically set around the 17th century Cossack uprising in the Polish Commonwealth.

In 'The Slave', the protaganist Jacob is a Jew that has found himself quite literally a slave to a Polish family as a consequent of the anti-Semitic rage that the Cossack uprising brought about. Jacob not only finds himself fortunate to be alive, but is in love with his master Jan Bzik's daughter, the beautiful Wanda. The romance develops throughout the story, along with Jacob the Jew's inner struggle to give into his feelings for Wanda the Gentile.

If you are a fan of slavic literature in general, you certainly won't be disappointed by this story.

brilliant evocation of a unique moment, yet with universal dilemmas.......2005-11-25

This is a beautiful, spare book about a great, forbidden passion, in which two cultures clash with tragic and yet strangely uplifting results. The Slave is Jacob, a survivor of unspeakable horrors in the 1648 Polish revolution - having lost his entire family and become enslaved in desperate and degrading circumstances, he strives to keep his religion and his inner self intact. What he discovers is an unexpected love in a Polish peasant, Wanda, who though simple is in fact intelligent and deep. There is an air of destiny to them.

The book largely takes the form of Jacob's inner dialogue, which is religious and scholarly, a natural outsider who strives to be good in terms that make sense to himself. This is an alien world of unpredictable dangers, race hatred, and bizarre superstitions that overturn his views of the universe as a good and just place - enough to enable his to cross the barriers he faces as he struggles to create a life for himself and then with Wanda. I found this deeply moving, masterfully translated into terms that I could comprehend and empathize with.

In addition, there is much to learn in this about the history of the Jews in Poland. Singer romanticises nothing and is hard on everyone concerned, with perhaps the exception of the lovers and their constant dread. It adds up to a truly vivid portrait of a time, yet played out with universal philosophical dilemmas. Jacob's is an extraordinary journey, believable and moving.

Warmly recommended. I will never forget this life.

For love of God and wife.......2005-04-18

Jacob, the pious protagonist of "The Slave," is the archetypal Wandering Jew in seventeenth-century Poland, a milieu in which Isaac Bashevis Singer places much of his fiction. As the novel begins, he is a refugee from his native village of Josefov, the site of a recent massacre by the Cossacks in which his wife and children have been murdered, and has been sold into slavery to a Polish farmer named Jan Bzik. The moronic, raffish gentiles in the village treat him like vermin, but Bzik's beautiful daughter Wanda shows him sympathy and is curious about his religion. As he teaches her about the Torah and Jewish law, they fall in love, both knowing that such an affair is dangerous.

Jacob's captivity ends after some years when his freedom is bought, which allows him to return to his own people. However, his love for Wanda thrusts him into a dilemma which causes him to question the strength of his convictions. He marries Wanda and persuades her to take the Hebrew name of Sarah before they settle in a new Jewish town called Pilitz. Because she is not yet fluent in the Yiddish he has taught her, and her speech would betray a Polish gentile accent, she decides to feign muteness. These measures are necessary because of the potential penalties involved: Wanda faces execution by the Polish government if she is discovered to have converted to Judaism; Jacob could be excommunicated for marrying a gentile, even a convert.

The plot sounds almost like that of a comedy in which the woman must put on an absurd act to hide her true identity from her neighbors, but "The Slave" is adamantly and morbidly serious about its themes. One is that Jacob, a learned man who is trusted as a teacher in his community, is obligated to uphold the Jewish law to the letter yet cannot deny his sincere love for his new wife. Another is the hypocrisy of the Jewish elders of Pilitz who pretend piety but do not hesitate to rob each other blind when the opportunity presents itself. Additionally, Singer colorfully portrays life in Poland at this time in history and the role of Jews in the establishment of its commerce and economic vitality.

A keeper of an ancient and unique storytelling tradition, Singer, who died in 1991, is the most famous of the "modern" Yiddish writers and may be the last great one. "The Slave," while perhaps too simplistic compared to his masterful short stories, is characteristic of his literary mystique and typical of his concern with what it means to be a Jew and how a man should conduct himself in this world.

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here is my review on this
My first book by Singer and surely not the last......
Already Gone
Nobel Prize Winners are few and far between
Living with the unthinkable

Enemies, A Love Story
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374515220

Book Description

Almost before he knows it, Herman Broder, refugee and survivor of World War II, has three wives: Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who hid him from the Nazis; Masha , his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of perpetually impending doom.

Customer Reviews:

here is my review on this.......2007-03-26

In New York

The hotel staff

gave me the chair

that

Isaac B Singer

used to

lean his back against

years before he died

custom made

produced

out of gentle wings of butterflies

that circled his first wife's head

every day and night in Treblinka

before she finally

went

up in smoke

So

I went down at the front desk

A weird occurence

of

that strange and powerful thing

I certainly

wanted to bring to their attention

Of course they say

I. B. Singer

never stayed here

never had a first wife

nor she died in the concentration camp

But what's metter?

My back

feels better

way better

ever since

My first book by Singer and surely not the last.............2007-01-01

Isaac Bashevis Singer writes a novel of sheer absurdity and yet, page by page, he makes it very believable.

Herman Broder is a Jew who managed to escape the gas chambers of the Nazi Holocaust by living in a hayloft with his mother's servant Yadwiga from Poland for three years. His wife was not so lucky.....she and her children were all killed by the Nazis......at least that is what we (along with Herman) are led to believe early on. Herman manages to make it to the United States where he marries the peasant girl servant Yadwiga out of sheer gratitude for her saving his life, not out of any kind of a love or fondness for her. And while he is married to Yadwiga, he is carrying on an affair with Masha, who also went through her own camp horrors in Russia. Herman identifies more with her, not to mention the fact that an attraction also exists there, both physically and intellectually.

But just when you think the suspension of disbelief Singer creates cannot get any more bizarre, it does, when Tamara, his ex-wife, shows up in New York, after surviving the Nazis. Herman now has two and sometimes three women after him, and still he is unable to commit to any one of them. Singer creates a novel of absurd proportions, and then has the temerity to keep it growing! And the arrant brilliance in it is that it works on the reader to the very end.

Along the way the characters reveal thoughts which make one think more of a philosophical treatise than of a novel, a mark of a great writer and one of the reasons I could not put this book down:

"How peculiar that a panful of brains should be constantly wondering and not able to arrive at any conclusion! They were all silent: God, the stars, the dead. The creatures who did speak revealed nothing."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, from the book "Enemies, A Love Story"

There are few writers such as Oscar Wilde to whom I can say they are unequivocally brilliant......Singer is certainly one of them.

Already Gone.......2006-12-21

How does one cope with such a thing? You know? The Holocaust.

It was the Holocaust that took Herman's parents, wife and two children. He manages to survive by hiding in a hayloft. For three long years, a former servant in his home, Yadwiga, a plain, uneducated but loving Polish woman, keeps him hidden and alive. After the war, we find Yadwiga and Herman married and living in Brooklyn. For other Holocaust survivors, Brooklyn represents opportunity, a sense of re-birth. All around him, new families are being formed out of what is left of old ones. Old customs are being renewed. The old prayers are said. Feasts are held. Traditions prevail. Life goes on. The future is hopeful, but not for Herman. Herman merely exists. He has a job as a ghost-writer for a famous rabbi. Herman is good at writing inspirational messages, messages of hope. But, Herman is not a believer. Not anymore. Not since the Holocaust. To Herman, God is either dead or an enemy. God is out to get him. Herman has a mistress, Masha, a camp survivor. His life is complicated. Then, as it turns out, his first wife who supposedly died in the camps, she's alive. Now Herman has two wives and a mistress. Complicated. They all want a piece of him. Emotionally, he retreats to the hayloft. But, emotionally, Herman is already dead, as dead as he would have been had he been found and sent to the camps, as dead as the rest of them, as dead as his faith in God. In the hayloft, minute by minute, day by dragging day, Herman was exterminated.

Nobel Prize Winners are few and far between.......2004-08-02

There are reasons that Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and all of these reasons are apparent in ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY.

Though he is not the only Jewish author to have won the Nobel, he is the only author whose primary writing was in Yiddish. Hence, the version of ENEMIES that I read was a translation.

Still, the simplicity of his prose shines through the novel. His storytelling skills are spellbinding.

Mr. Singer perfectly captures the undertone of desperation and doom connected with those who endured the Nazis and survived.

This novel will shock and it will sadden but it never will be less than writing at its finest.

Living with the unthinkable.......2004-07-28

Isaac Bashevis Singer was an idea novelist, in the way that Turgenev was. He fashioned his plots and characters around the questions he wanted to explore, and never let them get out of his control. But, like Turgenev, Singer was a great writer and never let his characters and plots become secondary. His writing is always entertaining as well as enlightening. Enemies, A Love Story is a case in point.

Herman Broder is a Jewish man living in New York City in the late 1940's, having survived the Holocaust in Poland hiding from the Nazis. Now the war is over, but Herman is no more at liberty than he was then. Believing his first wife died in a concentration camp, Herman has married again; he also has a mistress; to both women he lies about his work, and to his boss he lies about his women. Then his first wife shows up alive, and now he has to lie to her too. Herman is always on the verge of running, he must relentlessly cover his tracks in case he has to escape again. This sounds like a comedy of errors, and Singer finds the humor in Herman's plight, but he never loses sight of the tragedy which produced Herman's obsession with escape. This is a man so damaged that he can't really live anymore, and that's the question Singer is exploring with Enemies: is it possible to be whole again after going through the Holocaust? And if not, is it possible to live with the pieces that are left? Consider Vladek Spiegelman in Art Spiegelman's Maus, also a Holocaust survivor who only made it through sheer luck and a relentless hoarding and parceling out of otherwise mundane and unimportant items; now, though he's wealthy and free to do as he pleases, he can't stop hoarding, just in case.

Singer is asking, are the Jews who lived through Hitler's final solution dead, in their own way, like the victims who went into the ovens? What is there to do when you've lived through the unthinkable, and when so many people didn't? Enemies, A Love Story is a brilliant novel that grabs you by the mind as well as the heart.

City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel

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City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel
Hana Wirth-Nesher
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521473144

Book Description

City Codes is a study of the representation of the city in the modern novel that takes difference as its point of departure, so that cities are read according to the cultural and social position of the urbanite. City Codes argues that the modern urban novel, in contrast to earlier novels, is characterized by an intersection of public and private space, but that this intersection is mapped differently according to the position of the city dweller in terms of history, politics, nationality, gender, class, and race.

A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw

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The Best Autobiography by Far! by Sammy K. 4th Grade
The childhood of a master story- teller
I read this for a 6th grade book report and loved it!
Grandfather telling stories...

A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374416966

Book Description

An ALA Notable Book.

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The Best Autobiography by Far! by Sammy K. 4th Grade.......2006-04-20

I am Jewish, and I learned a lot from this book. I learned about life in Warsaw, and about the time period around World War I. It shows how that time compares to this, and how much more we have now than back then. Lots of people take electric lights for granted. This book shows what it was like to live through freezing weather, hunger, and stress about war.

I don't exactly like autobiographies, but this one really, really hit the spot!

The childhood of a master story- teller .......2005-01-12

Singer just has it. These vignettes of his childhood do not have the emotional power of his greatest stories but they are rich with life, insight and humor. And somehow he tells stories even when he is making simple descriptions of his early life. This work too tells the pain and poverty of his childhood and the difficulty of his parents' lives. It is too a tribute to a world - gone .

I read this for a 6th grade book report and loved it!.......2004-09-14

This book is a very good read for anyone and everyone that likes to read about foreign culture-- or even if you don't! I usually detest biographies and book reports, but reading this book made it FUN!

Grandfather telling stories..........2000-05-09

To enjoy listening to stories told by grandfather, you don't necessarily have to be a child! As a matter of fact, it is a life virtue to enjoy these stories told by Isaac Bashevis Singer, regardless of age. They are set in the now vanished Hassidic community of pre-II World War, but their moral content transcends time and space, and although they are soaked in Jewishness they equally appeal to the open-minded reader. Beware that out of the seventeen tales in this editon, 14 are included in "My Father's Court," by the same author.

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Literature as Anthropology
Amazing First Novel - Prophetic and Fabulistic
FANTASY
Well worth the read
Collective Hysteria

Satan in Goray: A Novel
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374524793

Book Description

As messianic zeal sweeps through medieval Poland, the Jews of Goray divide between those who, like the Rabbi, insist that no one can "force the end" and those who follow the messianic pretender Sabbatai Zevi. But as hysteria and depravity increase, it becomes clear that it is not the Messiah who has come to Goray.

Customer Reviews:

Literature as Anthropology.......2003-06-12

When times are desperate as they have been in many eras and many places, people tend to resort to desperate measures. They cast their lot with prophets, dreamers, and seers who foretell a bright future--the coming of the millenium, it is often called----when all problems shall be solved, the rough made plain, the poor made rich, and sick shall be healed. Movements develop. They may die away in time or they may thrive and create great civilizations. Western civilization, after all, is based on one such movement. We generally refer to these movements as "cults", unless of course they are successful. In many, but not all, millenial movements, people anticipate the immanent arrival of the New Age so strongly that they throw away their possessions and engage in dissolute behavior: singing, dancing, drinking, engaging in previously-forbidden sex, and so on. Sometimes the "pure" remove themselves to isolated spots to await the end of the world or the Great Change, in extreme cases, they may even commit suicide. Anthropologists have studied many such groups or religions; others are found in history books or newspapers. Our times are not devoid of such groups: remember Jonestown, remember the Branch Davidians, remember that group that committed suicide in California. China (the Taiping), Brazil (Antonio Conselheiro),, Papua New Guinea (the cargo cults), Africa (many studies), Burma, Europe---the list is nearly endless. The Jews have not been immune either. In the 1660s the famous "false Messiah" arose in Turkey, claiming to be ready to lead the Jews to Judgement Day and a new era. Throughout eastern Europe hope sprang up, especially in the Polish-Ukrainian regions devasted by the murderous Bogdan Chmielnitski not long before.

Written as a novel, with lively, colorful characters, Singer describes perfectly the course of such a millenial movement in Goray, an isolated Polish village. Whether you are interested in literature or anthropology, this is a description you cannot afford to miss. We follow the rise and fall of a local cult leader, a prophetess, and the feverish hopes of the Jews, longing for deliverance from "singing King Alpha's song in a strange land". Amidst strange marriages, the breaking of all the strict laws of kashrut, and the wild visions of prophecy, Goray's hopes soar and crash. If you think that the rise of post-Holocaust, post-pogrom Israel is just politics and has nothing to do with any sort of millenarianism, then you should read this wonderful book and reconsider. Powerful language, dark, dreadful images full of demons and damnation only possible from a master like Singer show the strength of the ancient dream of Israel. The tragedy is, of course, that in modern times the dream was realized at somebody else's expense. Reading Abdelrahman Munif's "Cities of Salt", in conjunction with Singer's book would not be a bad idea. It illustrates the world on which such dreams impacted. SATAN IN GORAY is a wonderful book of literature, anthropology, and history from which great understanding may flow. The world needs this understanding.

Amazing First Novel - Prophetic and Fabulistic.......2002-11-07

Consider that I.B. Singer wrote Satan in Goray at the age of 26 or so, and the impressiveness of this work becomes all the more clear. Few people of that age, or any age could evoke an historical era with such force or create a fractured narrative of such power. The world of religious conflict, superstition, and messianiac hysteria is Singer's main interest, subjects he would pursue for the rest of his life. Satan in Goray is a strong beginning, a prophetic book (written in the early 1930's) of a trapped people on the edge of a disaster.

The book takes place as the Jews of Gory attempt to recover from the Chelmelnicki massacres of the 1640's (the worst disaster for the Jews between the Crusades and the Holocaust). The Jews of Poland believe that, as Christian would say, the End Times are here, and expect the messiah to arrive. Shabbati Shevi appears on the scene, claiming to be the messiah. Many Jews fall under his sway, but the Rabbi of Goray resists and this further wracks the town. As these political and social disasters are played out, a young orphan, Rechele, who is insane, becomes the center of interest of the town, as she is unmarried. When a holy man, Itche Mates, arrives in Goray, he marries the unfortuate Rechele, who proceeds to be posessed by Satan and do things that make Linda Blair in the Excorsist look amateur.

The novel itself has some problems; it's birth as a serial leaves it episodic. One has the sense of threads stopping and starting without reason, and there really is not what could be called a plot. However, Singer's rich language, his pinpoint descriptions of people, places, and religious factions are stunning. Reading his work is an education.

Satan in Goray is a look into the hearts of Polish Jews right before World War II. The sense of helpless claustrophobia is appalling, the whiff of death overwhelming here. Satan was not just in Goray, and Singer knew it.

FANTASY.......2001-09-10

This novel is based on the historical occurrence of the appearance of the false messiah Sabbath Zevi and the mass following he generated .While the bare facts of the delusion may be true , I believe that the fleshing out of the characters, their thoughts and behaviour are a misrepresentation .
'Satan in Goray' is set in the mid Seventeenth Century , and yet strongly reflects the Twentieth , especially drawing on I.B. Singer's life and milieu .
It would be useful to read his autobiographical 'Love in Exile' together with the novel
to see that Isaac Bashevis Singer had an axe to grind .
Singer's parents were pious , learned Jews , and young Isaac defected from the
essence of his forbears' religion , as did many of his peers , while retaining
the peripheral cultural artifacts and images which preoccupied his writings.
This loss of faith prejudiced him and thus in 'Satan in Goray' he depicts his
ancestors as superstitious , foolish to the degree of lunacy , cruel and violent , filthy and uncouth, as well as emotionally and sexually out of control . The wisdom , kindness and beauty of his heritage are not shown in the novel which is a caricature of the worst character traits in man .I refuse to believe the people of the shtetl were anything like that ! The few wise scholars in the book are just mentioned as such but do not flourish nor triumph .They appear as absolutely impotent and irrelevant .
In the battle between good and evil , the evil is not defeated , it just collapses .The sect self destructs when Shabbatai converts to Islam .
Singer plugs his vegetarianism in a bloody depiction of ritual slaughter as a filthy orgy of violence . He depicts Jewish parenting as ruthlessly cruel beyond plain child abuse . Rechele's upbringing is just unbelievably nightmarishly cruel ! Jewish parenting is not like that !
Some may take pride in the award of a Nobel prize to Singer , but perhaps the Nobel
committee was being ideological, by rewarding and promoting the denigration of Jewry as well as the rejection of core Jewish values .

The novel is definitely not realistic fiction but grotesque fantasy and I suppose that , if
it is written as a work of art in that genre of horror fiction then as a work of art , whatever art is , it might be acceptable to some. The Shabbetai Tzvi phenomenon in the novel may also be read as metaphor for modern "messianic" movements e.g. Bolshevism or Stalinism which were part of Singer's milieu as described in his autobiography , and these certainly did take hold in a violent excessive fashion .

Well worth the read.......2001-07-21

Singer may be the only winner of the Nobel Prize to write in a language considered dead. Nonetheless, his crisp prose and enticing style make it a worthwhile read to anyone who is interested in the subject or just in exploring a great novel.

In the 17th Century, European Jewish civilization almost collapsed. Social norms fell apart as people abandoned their homes and their farms in something that can only be described as a mass psychosis. Satan in Goray tells the story from the perspective of one town.

Singer begins to explore a life long interest in the issues of what makes society good and what is evil in this first novel. If you want to get a flavor for his genius, this is an excellent place to start.

Collective Hysteria.......2000-01-28

"Satan in Goray" is the first novel written by I.B.Singer and is characterized by its deep emotional and psychological content. Written at a time of troubles for the Jewish community in Eastern Europe, more specifically in Poland, it draws a parallel between the messianic disaster of Sabbatai Zevi and revolutionary ecstasies. In 1666, 18 years after the infamous Chmelniski massacres, a messianic movement developed in Eastern Europe, under the leadership of Sabbatai Zevi who proclaimed himself to be the long-awaited Messiah. The uncertainties and despair felt by the Jewish community, a deep-rooted belief in national redemption, and lack of strong traditional rabbinical leadership, all contributed to the initial success of messianism. The story takes place in a remote town by the name of Goray, and main character, a feeble-minded young woman by the name of Rechelle, personifies the forces of evil (messianism) taking root amongst the population and leading to the downfall of its members, bringing total chaos. I.B.Singer's story is an epic description of the struggle between the forces of evil and good, of reason and emotion, of traditional conservative Judaism and messianism. The narrative is strong, realistic, impulsive, almost suffocating; it truly depicts the spirit of collective hysteria.

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