Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tales of the world I never knew and never will, March 20, 2000
Thanks to my grandparents, who came to America in the first decade of the 20th century, I grew up and have had a good life. Thanks to my grandparents, I didn't become a piece of ash or a few tossed out bones in an Eastern European field at the age of 2. Wars are wars; they've occured throughout human history, but in most of them, whole civilizations didn't disappear. But the Eastern European Jewish world is gone forever. I might belong to the same gene pool, but compared to the characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories, I'm as American as apple pie. Irish-Americans can discover their roots in Ireland, Chinese-Americans in China, and so on, but not me. My cultural roots are gone forever. The only way I can learn them is through reading literature written by Singer, Shalom Aleichem, Isaac Babel and others who describe that vanished world. So, obviously, my interest and pleasure in reading such wonderful tales as appear in THE SEANCE and OTHER STORIES is all the more. Never mind my personal reasons. These amazing stories, by a Nobel Prize winner, will stay with you for a long time. The strange, sad characters afflicted by poverty and by life, bring us face to face with common human personalities of all times and places, while also depicting the conditions and peculiar relationships of Jews in Poland too. Magic, religion, animals, thieves, rabbis, prostitutes, mystics, Holocaust survivors, Talmudic scholars, prisoners, books, butchers and shopkeepers crowd the pages. In each story, you find pathos and tragedy, happiness and satisfaction, tensions and transformations. Two of the stories, "The Seance" and "The Letter Writer" must rank with the best stories I have ever read; none of the others are bad. If you have never read Singer, this is an excellent book to start with. If you have, you know what I am talking about. This is the great writer at the top of his form.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent - as good as it gets!, November 29, 1999
Isaac Bashevis Singer was no doubt one of the greatest short story writers - ever! The various collections in the end also earned him a very well deserved Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. Several of his stories were first published in magazines like The New Yorker, Encounter and Playboy. The first collection I read was Passions and Other Stories, which immediately made me realise what a master Isaac Bashevis Singer was. Later I have read several of his novels and short stories, where especially the collections Gimpel the Fool, Short Friday and The Seance are at least as good as Passions. All a magnificent world of Isaac Bashevis Singer's saints and sinners. Sad, funny, ironic, poignant and seeming to come from Singer's pen without any efforts. This is what good short stories is all about!
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