From Publishers Weekly
Originally published between 1955 and 1960 as a series of columns in the Jewish Daily Forward, and now issued in Singer's fifth posthumous collection, these 28 autobiographical sketches are set in and around the beth din (rabbinical court) run by Singer's father in their native Warsaw in the early 20th century. These brief stories lack the gravity of Nobelist Singer's more substantial works, but cumulatively conjure up the clannish, confounding and often melancholy world of ghetto Jewry. The young SingerDwho as narrator uses techniques that clearly are fictionalDobserves some marital consternation: a man complains to the rabbi about his unfaithful wife, yet acknowledges the cuckold "brings some joy into the house"; another, seeking forgiveness from the fianc e he dumped, reunites with her after 12 years, leaving Singer inspired "to write a storybookDfull of secrets and mysteries." At another point, the author declares, "one person can never really know another"; he can't decide whether a traveling salesman trusts the wife he leaves behind or whether he simply doesn't care what she does. Leviant's translation renders Singer's prose in an appropriately contemporary vein: "Regret is not businesslike," declares a man sued by an old woman who wanted him to say kaddish (the prayer for the dead) for her. After watching the ritual slaughter of chickens, the young narrator asks, "How could God see all this and remain silent?" PerhapsDif one can speculate about the author's unspoken rejoinderDbecause Warsaw Jews were to see much worse. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Nobel laureate Singer's love of stories evolved during his Warsaw boyhood as he listened to neighbors and strangers alike consult with his gentle rabbi father and ever-patient mother. Recollections of this lost world were collected in
In My Father's Court (1966), and now 28 more of his fablelike reminiscences, originally published in Yiddish during the 1950s in the Jewish
Daily Forward , are available in English for the first time. And they are simply magical. Too young to fully understand all that he listened to so intently, Singer nonetheless grasped the gist of each dilemma and marveled at the "strangeness of human relationships." He describes a selfish butcher who dreams of going to America; a gravedigger who both laments and condones his wife's betrayals; a wife who divorces her pious and elderly husband because she doesn't want to give up her cushy life and accompany him to Jerusalem. And then there's the man who believes his bad luck will end if he secures his former fiancee's forgiveness, then falls in love with her all over again when she appears in Singer's father's court. Singer, too, is dazzled and offers an unforgettable self-portrait of himself as "a boy with red sidecurls, who knew bizarre secrets, was mixed up in the affairs of strangers, and was thinking wild thoughts." These fleeting days on the eve of World War I, conjured with such vitality and precision, stayed with Singer until his death in 1991 and imbued his precious fiction with its unique blend of insight and fancy, realism and romance.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
