Synopses & Reviews
To mark the centennial of the birth of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Library of America presents Collected Stories, a major celebration of Singer's achievement. Beginning with Gimpel the Fool, whose title story brought Singer to sudden prominence in America when translated by Saul Bellow in 1953, and concluding with The Death of Methuselah, the collection published three years before his death in 1991, this three-volume edition brings together for the first time all the story collections Singer published in English in the versions he called his "second originals"--translations he supervised and collaborated on, revising as he worked. In addition, Collected Stories includes previously uncollected or unpublished stories from his manuscripts in the Ransom Center collections, providing a rare glimpse into the workshop of a literary genius. Here are nearly 200 stories--the full range of Singer's vision--encompassing Old World shtetl and New World exile. Born in Poland in 1904 into a family of rabbis, Singer was raised in a traditional culture that perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War, and his haunting stories testify to the richness of that vanished world. Singer's Old World tales reveal a wild, mischievous, often disturbing supernaturalism evocative of local storytelling traditions. After his immigration to America, Singer's stories increasingly explore the daily lived reality and imaginative boundaries of Jewish culture as it was transplanted to the United States, revealing him to be the emblematic immigrant American writer, a writer whose vision and insights enlarged our idea of what it is to be an American.
Review
"To present the irrational in the clearest and most disciplined of styles is one of the aims of this great short story writer. And more and more Singer shows us the irrational in a modern context whose meaning is shadowed and deepened, of course, by the East European background of many of his characters. Thus Singer, like Nabokov, is a great spanner of wildly different cultures—and this makes him very modern and very American. He is also a survivor in a savage age who never renounces the boon and burden of life." Reviewed by d T. Gies, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
By the time Isaac Bashevis Singer published the three short-story collections gathered in this Library of America volume--
A Friend of Kafka (1970),
A Crown of Feathers (1973), and
Passions (1975)--he had made his home in America for nearly four decades. Earning his living as a columnist for the Yiddish newspaper
Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), he had risen from nearly complete anonymity outside of his Yiddish readership to international celebrity as "the last of the great Yiddish fiction writers," as Anzia Yzierska once called him. Awarded prizes, feted in the United States and abroad, eagerly sought for lectures and interviews, he had brought about this remarkable transformation primarily though the translation of his stories. Often collaborating with his translators, Singer intended the English version of his stories to be regarded not as diminished approximations of his Yiddish stories but as works shaped by the author in the language of his adopted homeland.
The sixty-five stories in Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions--the second of three volumes--reflect Singer's origins in Poland and his long exile in America. Although he continued to write tales drawing on Jewish folk traditions and supernaturalism, many of his stories from the late 1960s and early 1970s take place in the United States, as Singer explored the psychic devastation wrought by the Nazi genocide on Holocaust survivors ("The Cafeteria"), evoked the fragility of transplanted forms of Jewish life and belief ("The Cabalist of East Broadway"), and reflected on the spiritual hazards of worldly success in America ("Old Love"). Stories such as "A Day in Coney Island," "A Tutor in the Village," and "The Son"--based on Singer's reunion with his son Israel Zamir after a twenty-year separation--show Singer blurring the line between autobiography and fiction, a tendency that marks much of his later writing.
About the Author
Isaac Bashevis Singer emigrated to New York from Poland in 1935 and found work with the Jewish Daily Forward. Author of many novels, collections of short stories, and books for children, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the author or editor of numerous books.