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A very good collection of the best loved stories of this Nobel Prize winner's work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

From the master of the short story
If I was stranded on a deserted island and somehow was given the choice of three books that I could have with me, I think I would pick the Bible, "The Complete Plays of Shakespeare" and "The Collected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer".This collection is an excellent example of the quality and diversity of Singer's talent.There are stories from the present and from the past all containing marvelous characters that amuze, intrigue, and/or mystify the reader.Among the best are "The Admirer", "Sabbath in Portugal", "Three Encounters", "The Adventure", and "Passios"."The Admirer" is a tale about a meeting with a fan of his that turns into a comical nightmare."Sabbath in Portugal" is a tale of a lonely visit to an alien country where the author encounters a faith that survived the inquisition and an encounter with someone he thought was lost forever."Three Encounters" is the tale of a young man's innocent suggestion to a young bride and the sucessive corruption that results."The Adventure" tells of an unusual request and the challenge of if and how to respond.Finally, "Passions" tells of the ability of a simple man to overcome the impossible with the proper amount of focussed passion.All the stories are worth reading.The world's greatest short story writer has produced another example of why he is so revered. ... Read more

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When their wishes fail, three children learn that they must deserve by effort what they had wanted to get too easily. ... Read more

Product Description
Aiming to stand as a metaphor for the failure of civilization to tame man's instinctive brutality but also of his enduring idealism and hope, this novel by the Nobel prize winning author of "Shosha" and "Enemies, A Love Story", describes the subjugation of the Poles by an invading Germanic tribe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

An Existential Tale
Singer in his novel "The King of the Fields," written in 1988, just three years before his death, examines religions (Christian, pagan, Jewish), myth, male-female relationships, sex, politics, and man, through a purported history of pre-medieval Poland. The novel is basically an existential examination of man and his beliefs positioned in a fairy-tale world. In many ways it shares themes with the Book of Job and possesses slipstream qualities similar to those in William Golding's The Inheritors and Jack London's Before Adam. But even this comparison is not accurate. Perhaps, a better comparison would be to Kafka's "The Castle," Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund," Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," or Camus' "The Plague." All of these books are philosophic texts examining belief and philosophy. Each of these books illustrates how a novelist can write a philosophic text without sacrificing the essential qualities and pleasures inherent in a novel.

The story is set during the emergence of Poland approximately three or four centuries after the death of Christ, a time when the hunter-gatherers are beginning to cultivate the fields and missionaries from Rome are arriving in the Northern woods to convert the pagans to Christianity. In his created world of the forests near the Vistula, Singer demonstrates dramatically the interaction and absurdities of religion as exercised by untutored, unlettered men, struggling for supremacy and survival in a state of nature. Like Hobbes, Singer shows man in this fantastic world as brutish and deadly; with his survival depending upon strength, intelligence, guile, and luck.

Iron men ravage the land, destroying, murdering and raping; however, our protagonist, Cybula, although a skilled hunter, is not a hero or a warrior. Instead, he seems to be a precursor to the Singer nebbish. He assumes control when fate demands it but he is never comfortable with the mantle. Women control his life, although he seems to have an inordinate success with them. He is not comfortable with the change from hunter-gatherer to sower, farmer, villager, although he quickly sees its advantages.

The action begins when a group of Poles take control of a tribe of Lesniks; hunter-gatherers living near the Zakopane mountains. The Poles led by Krol Rudy, the Red King, descend on the Lesniks like wolves on sheep. They murder the men and rape the women. Some of the Lesniks, led by Cybula, flee to the forests and the mountains but most of the survivors--women and children--fall under the control of the Poles. Eventually, Krol Rudy makes peace with the Lesniks because he needs workers to harvest his wheat. He, then, makes Cybula his head-man and marries his daughter to tie the Lesniks and the Poles together through marriage.

On one level Singer uses this story to study the transformation of the Lesniks from hunter-gatherers to town dwellers and farmers. On another level he follows the progression of man's beliefs in the gods. First Ben Dosa, a Jew, arrives in the village, and he brings the message of the one God. Later, a priest arrives and he preaches Christ and accuses Ben Dosa of killing God.

Suddenly, religious prejudice arises and hatred of the other fills the villagers with rage. The women attack a Mongol woman for her slanted eyes and they beat Ben Dosa for trying to protect her. Within the context of the novel, Singer works in the theme of the scape-goat and hatred of the Jew, as other.

We quickly realize that Singer is using the historical novel to comment on the present, on the way the world is now. Although, the Jew, Ben Dosa, is a decent and moral man, Cybula is the protagonist and the one who carries Singer's ultimate message. Cybula worships only one God and that God is death. Singer's conclusion is:life is short and brutish and the only tangible, living God that man can expect to speak or reveal himself is death. For Cybula there are moments of passion and happiness but these moments are short and rare. There is always another Krol Rudy who wishes to take control and dominate.

Ultimately, the novel is existential in theme. Cybula is a loner, who leaves the village and lives in exile in the woods with his young wife, Kora, and waits for death, which he expects to arrive shortly. Ben Dosa seems to experience a bit of happiness in Rome with his people but even his happiness is overshadowed by superstition and emanations of fate.

Although the themes of the novel are dark and man's future bleak, it is an amazing book. Singer translated it from the Yiddish and the prose is precise and lyrical. He carefully describes the society and its inhabitants. Each character is delineated and articulated. And even though it is a complete fabrication, more a fairy-tale, than a realistic rendition of a historical period, it is so well-wrought that you believe in it and its characters.

Singer's novels, like the novels of Kafka, always seem to have a quality of otherness to them. When the villagers talk about the witch god, Baba Yaga, you expect her to appear. Mystery and magic seem to lurk around the edges, although the novel is meant to be realistic. It is this magical realism that raises the book in my esteem.

Not Singer's best, but a good way to view his creative drives
This novel, a pre-history of Poland, is really a post-history of Isaac Singer.The concerns of his character and the characterization of this Poland is Singer's: a man who has a plural marriage (this time with a mother and daughter, sometimes it is two sisters, sometimes unrelated women), who grows disgusted with eating meat, and whose only faith is the belief in death.This is the end of The Family Moskat: "Death is the real Messiah, and that is the truth!"And here it is again, slightly less brilliant and stiring, but not without some drama and interest.Singer's Poland (like Singer's New York) is really about the difficulty of finding and maintaing belief in our world, a world that works to strip us of it with unbending will.

History?
Over the years, I have read this novel a number of times.Contrary to many interpretations of this work, I did not view it as a historical novel, at least not the history that is represented on the surface.Instead, it is the history of Poland, Christianity and Judaism now, then and every time in between.Furthermore, it is a story of the human condition.One should not approach this novel in a literal sense.If you do, you are bound to be disappointed.

good, but not the best from Singer
This book deals with transition between the society of hunters and gatherers into society of peasants who worked the land. Changes are difficult, old beleifs die hard, and at the dawn of civilization there weremany cruel things hapenning. I wish I could beleive that human beings havemade significant progress, but unfortunately that probably isn't true. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of short stories which explores the humor and life of the people of Poland. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Wonderful
My 10-year-old son enjoyed this classic and so did I.We highly recommend it.

Eight fabled delights
Isaac Singer aptly dedicated this book of eight stories to his family--and to all readers young and old, who contemplate the wonder of growing up and facing the riddle of life and love.

Thus he begins with the book's title story. Naftali, to make a long, delicious story short, grew up at the feet of his father Zelig, who often told him of and imp, whose tail tasted like salt. He also grew up reading and loving stories.

Reb Zebulin told him that even fictional stories were often true. After hearing stories that sounded completely unbelievable, Reb Zebulin would go to a place where those things had actually happened. "The brain is created by God," he told Naftali, "and human thoughts and fantasies are also God's works."

Thus Naftali resolved to become a bookseller and a writer when he grew up. He could not support himself, but he met Reb Falik, who had a house built for Naftali to house all the books that he intended to bequeath him. When his horse Sus died, he marked the grave with the oak whip he never used. Several weeks later, the whip sprouted shoots and roots, much as his stories had done.

Other tales take readers to Chelm, the village of idiots young and old. Even the people have funny names--Gronam Ox, Dopey Lekisch, Zeinvel Ninny, Shmendrick Numskull,Feyvel Thickwit, Sender Donkey, Treitel Fool and their most foolish compatriots. For many weeks, these sages had been sitting about wondering why the town treasury was empty and they had not received their wages.

Then 80-year-old Zalman Typpesh arrived, offering 2,000 pieces of gold if they could provide good advice as to how he could live forever. Shlemiel finally arrived at the solution: Dalfunka, a nearby suburb was where all the paupers live. He noted with great satisfaction that no rich man had ever died there. Thus, if Zalman moved to Dalfunka, he would live forever. Needless to say, he moved to Dalfunka, went broke spending money on blintzes and died--a pauper.

To discover the details--and six more of Singer's fabled delights--you'll have to read this book.

--Alyssa A. Lappen ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Only for those who must have every photo available of IB Singer
The best thing about this short book is the photographic documentation of the imp that inhabited Singer. One can't exactly say that the photos show the twinkle in his eye, since in at least one ID photo, IB Singer wore dark sunglasses. There's a beautiful full spread color photo of his work room, about which Singer used to joke "I can say I have accomplished vone thing in my life, my chaos has reached perfection." (The quote is from Dvorah Telushkin's Singer biography). I didn't find the mini-essays particularly interesting, with the exception of Cynthia Ozick's.

Like a Readers Digest Compilation
It has a little of everything in it, but there's something weirdly cheap and dated about Library of America's Singer album, a companion to their publication of Isaac Balshevis Singer's collected work in three volumes.It's almost as though they were going in this case for the coffee table crowd.They have dragooned in a motley group of authors to respond to Singer's work, and the results are predictably up and down.Sometimes I had the feeling the exact same contributors could have been set upon to write appreciations of some other bygone figure, say Fanny Brice, and come up with the same kind of verbiage that fills column inches.I did very much like Jonathanb Safron Foer's appreciation of Singer.That boy is like the Human Litmus Paper of Jewish writing, sucking up even that which he cannot understand.

Singer's first story "Old Age" was written when he was still a young man, in 1925.He moved to the USA in 1935, and his first years were difficult ones.SATAN IN GORAY was written in Warsaw, while THE ASHKENAZY BROTHERS was written in Brooklyn.The book is jammed full of bright pictures of Singer looking puckish and cheerful, rather like Isaac Stern.Ilan Stavans, the world's greatest authority on Singer, has edited this volume, not always to maximum effect, but I can imagine it was kind of a rush effort trying to maximize on the impact of Singer en masse.One photo looks like Singer lived in the apartment of Henry Darger, there is so much "clutter" it's surprising either was able to get any work done at all. ... Read more

Product Description
In 1975, twenty-one-year-old Dvorah Telushkin wrote a letter to the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, offering to drive him to and from a creative writing class in return for permission to attend the course. The literary master, then seventy-one, accepted the offer, which led to a twelve-year-long apprenticeship for Telushkin.

Throughout Dvorah Telushkin's tenure with Singer, she kept detailed diaries chronicling both their literary efforts and the evolution of their personal relationship. Indeed, Telushkin was the one person to whom Singer tried to teach his craft as a writer. She writes about the great moments in Singer's public life, his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, his fiery encounter with the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, his surprising meeting with Barbra Streisand, who adapted and starred in the movie version of Singer's short story "Yentl." But the private Singer is revealed as well, the "merry pessimist" haunted by despair and torn between the old-world ethic of his Hasidic forebears in Europe and the moral abandon of modern secular man. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Honest, Just, Revealing
Here Dvorah Telushkin provides a complex and layered portrait of Isaac Singer and her interactions with him.There is the added attraction that Telushkin has a well crafted writing style, elevated while smooth, homey while erudite.To its credit, this memoir is not crafted in any chronological fashion.Each chapter is a slice of her life with Singer, their work together and conversations.She weaves us in and out of Singer and his world, leisurely but with a purpose, even reproducing, to great effect, the Yiddish cadences and accent of his spoken English.Possibly the strongest element in this memoir is Telushkin's fierce honesty with her own complex set of emotions about Singer.Here is a man who she is fashioning as a father figure, and (as a notorious Don Juan and egocentric) he is a poor pick.Telushkin shows the darker side of Singer's personality, and her own odd attraction to it; so in the end, this book is more about Teluskhin's journey of self-discovery and maturity than it is about Isaac Singer.But this does not detract from the quality of this work:driven, honest and beautiful, it is a haunting book of genuine emotional integrity.

Anyone who loves Singer will learn from this work
This work gives an inside view of the daily life and work habits of one of the greatest masters of the short story the world has known. It is honest and painful in its realistic description of the great writer's last years. It is filled with rich Jewish knowledge and the wisdom and wit of the paradoxical difficult and yet very great writer Singer. Anyone who loves this writer will benefit from reading this very rich and vibrant work of devotion and memory.

A haunting farewell to Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a controversial figure during his lifetime. Though his place in the twentieth-century canon of literature now seems secure, it is still often pointed out that thanks to the Holocaust, Singer's fame was granted to him at the cost of obscurity for other Yiddish writers. His personality also was known to be difficult. There are many who will tell you that Singer was a bastard, including Elie Wiesel (not normally a gossip) in "All Rivers Run to the Sea." Singer probably was one at least fifty percent of the time. Too many stories of his caprice, vanity, and greed for sex and money have been told to be discounted. As to the nature behind both the faults and the gifts, what one saw of it depended on who one was; any competitors for the limelight, real or imagined, got the worst of it. Women got both the best and the worst of Singer, the charm and naivete combined with the mistrust and the manipulation. It is thus fitting that a possibly definitive memoir of Singer should have been written by a woman. Dvorah Telushkin was the writer's secretary and occasional translator. She comes across as a most lovable person, without any of Singer's guile. But they still had a lot in common: they were both fearful and susceptible to flattery. Ms. Telushkin was estranged from her father, Singer from his only child. Dvorah's innocence fit Singer's feminine ideal, exemplified by the child-woman in "Shosha." For years, theirs was a relationship in perfect order. But after winning the Nobel Prize, Singer's ego ran away with him while his health deteriorated rapidly. He became more and more paranoid, finally rejecting Dvorah as he had rejected most others. Ms. Telushkin manages the difficult feat of recording Singer's decline honestly and without sentimentality, while leaving us in no doubt as to her lasting love for him and little as to its essential justice. It is to be hoped that she continues as a writer, one with large ambitions. She has been influenced by Singer; her achievement is to make his eerie tone blend so well with her sense of her own life as a bad dream that the influence comes to seem more like an inheritance. She rescues Singer from the context of Yiddish nostalgia and places him within his own heritage of Jewish fear, uncertainty, and faith, as little G-rated as Celine. This is a deeply touching, near-perfect book. It is required reading for Singer fans, but it is also recommended to anyone struggling to understand a difficult and much-loved parent. ... Read more

Product Description
As they stand around near Noah's completed ark, the different animals of the world noisily jostle each other, competing for a place on the vessel. ... Read more

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Even though they were poor, the people of Chelm were content with their lives until the Council of Sages made them aware of their problems. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Enjoyable
Short and enjoyable.Perhaps I'm ungrateful, but I expected more from a Nobel Prize winner and a Yiddish master taking on a classic subject.

Luck soup
You could say I like Chelm stories, and that I buy every one I can.

You could also say that Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote this tale in 1973, was no ordinary purveyor of Chelm shtiklech. You can tell from his beginning, a master's parody of Genesis.

"The pious believed that God said, 'Let there be Chelm.' And there was Chelm. But many scholars insisted that the town happened as the result of an eruption.

" 'Before Chelm,' they said, 'the area was one huge chaos, all fog and mist. Then came a great explosion and Chelm appeared.

"At the beginning the surface of Chelm was so hot that even if Chelmites had already existed, they could not have walked on the earth because they would have burned their feet." The first Chemites, this version goes, were not people but microbes, amoebas and other such creatures. When people finally arrived in town, they had names like Gronam the First, aka Gronam Ox, and Dopey Lekisch, Zeinvel Ninny, Treitel Fool and Shmendrick Numskull. And they practically invented problems.

One of the biggest was that the people of nearby Gorshkov called the Chelmites fools. Gronam Ox told his compatriots, "We Chelmites know that, of the ten measures of wisdom sent down to earth from heaven, nine went to Chelm. But the conceited people of Gorshkov think they are the clever ones and we are the fools." What does he propose? Why making war, of course.

Needless to say, the Chelmnicks end up in the wrong place, a God-forsaken town called Mazelborsht (translation: luck soup). Defeated by their own foolishness, they returned to Chelm half naked, weaponless and with broken noses and black eyes. This produced the expected seven days and seven nights of contemplation which resulted in four sage proclamations.

Next the Chelmites abolished money, decided to hold elections once every 40 years, asked Zeckel Poet to compose a hymn of 12,000 lines which schoolchildren must learn by heart and appoint Shlemeil secretary. Of course, the merchants refused to part with their goods for nothing, which resulted in a system of barter in which Zeckel Poet was the most eager participant, followed by Shmoyger the matchmaker, Fultsha Jester and the Chelm band. Nothing was exchanged.

To discover what became of Singer's Chelm, you'll have to exchange some abolished currency for this masterwork, which contains much hilarity. And of course, you'll be in luck soup if you find a copy. Alyssa A. Lappen

Fools are we all!
It is always a pleasure to read something by I.B.Singer.Although this short tale is recommended for ages 9-12, it is certainly also addressed to any age beyond.The tale is a delightful satire of society's political andideological systems, in may aspects a short version of George Orwell's"Animal Farm." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Poignant Photo-Filled Book of Jewish Life in pre-WWII Poland
The many pictures of this book, generally dating from the period 1860-1920, hearken back to a simpler time. They make it obvious that, not only were Poland's Jews generally unassimilated, but that they essentially lived in a world of their own. [The reader, beholding the poverty of the Jews, should realize that most Poles were even poorer.] A hierarchy existed within the Jewish community: "Manual workers were generally looked upon with condescension, but some professions were held to be lower than others." (p. 12).

This work includes many definitions of Jewish terms. For instance, a latke is a potato pancake, and a cheder is a school for children. Contrary to misconceptions, Poland's Jews had not generally been forcibly ghettoized: "Except for two towns, where the Christian clergy succeeded in establishing closed and locked ghettos (Lwow and in the Krakow suburb of Kazimierz), the Jews lived in the shtetlach and in special sections in the cities." (p. 8).

Shulman realizes the fact that prejudices between Poles and Jews went both ways, and that a fundamental disconnect had long existed between the two peoples. He describes the marketplace as follows: "Here the peasants of the neighboring villages came to sell their products, buy urban products from the Jews, and use the services of the Jewish artisans. In the course of centuries this contact was seldom of lasting duration or of profound value. The relationship usually remained on the level of mutual distrust. To the Jew, the non-Jew was the symbol of raw instinct, of physical power and primitive reflexes. To the peasant, the Jew represented slyness, brains, and, most of all, religious heresy...The peasant saw a Jew praying, wrapped in an exotic shawl, wearing a little black box on his forehead and arm; he heard strange words muttered in a dark language. This unknown created the usual fear and hatred." (p. 15).

The Zydokomuna (bolshevized Judaism) is commonly misportrayed as something limited to the tiny Communist Party, or even something that represented a repudiation of Judaism. In contrast, Shulman recognizes its broad-based following, as well as the fact that it was, in essence, a secularized mutation of conventional Jewish thinking. He writes: "While studying the teachings of Marx and Engels, Lassale and Medem, the Jewish poor in the shtetl saw how smoothly the new teachings fitted into the words of the ancient prophets...Many of the young Bundists from the crowded, poor streets of the shtetl, educated on the Talmud, didn't actually have such a long way to go. Later, when the Bund became a powerful party with its own candidates for the Polish parliament and municipal bodies, thousands of religious Jews gave their votes to those `godless socialists.' They were not frightened of the sharp slogans, for they sounded familiar. They had heard them from the prophets." (pp. 25-26).[However, poverty alone doesn't explain the appeal of Communism. Polish peasants generally lived in abject poverty under an unjust holdover quasi-feudal system, yet their support for Communism had been virtually nonexistent.]

Finally, Shulman touches on Poland's Jewish community just before the Holocaust: "Between the two world wars Jewish life went through a period of amazing renaissance in independent Poland, a period never experienced before except perhaps in Spain. Never before was the cultural life so rich...for the first time Jewish political parties became a power in the political constellation of the country." (p. 27). Whereas the books read by parents tended to be religious ones, those read by the youth were quite different: "The new books were DAS KAPITAL of Marx, FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND WORKSHOPS by Piotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin, ALTNEULAND by Theodor Herzl, and even WHAT IS TO BE DONE? by Lenin. (p. 27).

Photographic history of the shtetl Jews
The events of centuries of persecution and forced migrations led to a concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe in the years before World War II. To maintain a distinct culture, they established communities known as "shtetls" which were generally self-sufficient enclaves. This book is a collection of photographs of members of those Jewish communities, largely as they went about their daily lives.
The members of this community were very class conscious, there was a distinct hierarchy of occupations, and with the highest being that of a scholar. Woman were second class citizens, one of the daily prayers of the men gave thanks to God that they were not born a woman. One of the most interesting facts is that these communities did not require a police force. The social restrictions were so strong that the community leaders were able to deal with almost all-social deviance.
Since time and tragic world events have combined to destroy the shtetl communities in Eastern Europe, this is an important historical record of how the Jews of Eastern Europe lived. We see them at work, at leisure, in their homes, but very rarely at play. Their lives were full, and you can see their strong survival instincts in these photographs.
... Read more

Product 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.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

Powerful and tragic
I had read almost all of Singer but never this one. In his many chronicles of the Jews of Old Poland, Singer has brought all their pungent energies to life - the dedication to Torah study and observance, along with superstition, magic, demons, angels, food, love, sex, marital infidelity, even a fascination with communism. But he has mostly stayed away from the reality which ended that rich world; the Holocaust. Shosha is different. For the first time Singer wraps his narrative around the certainty that Hitler will invade Poland and destroy these people. Their various reactions - fatalism, Messianism, denial - are realistic and terribly sad. There is no theme of resistance; the Jews of Poland perceived little control over their destiny. The near suicidal depression of many of the characters is deeply upsetting to read. It was not until the founding of Israel that Jewish energy turned from helplessness to an assertive struggle for life. Singer was clearly swept up in this real life drama as he wrote Shosha, to the point of losing or purposely letting drift the plot thread as personal lives are taken over by a global tragedy.

The thread of the story is the narrator's love and devotion to the mentally challenged girl Shosha, to the point of marrying and protecting her and giving up his dissolute love affairs with sophisticated women. Indeed the author is twice offered escape to a safe America and twice rejects it in order to care for Shosha. The mystery throughout the book is why the protagonist does this; otherwise he is a very selfish man. My reading is that this love story is Singer's personal response to the Holocaust. The girl Shosha stands for Singer's bond with the Jewish people in their innocence and inability to defend themselves. Here is a man who no longer believes in G-d but nevertheless sacrifices himself to protect this innocence and purity, to make a gesture. It is a very moving story. It ends with an epilogue in Israel, with yet another kind of crazy life, but a new pride. Singer's final word: We are still waiting for the answers.

This book was published in the year Singer won the Nobel Prize and shows why his work will long be remembered.

A great book; Singer is a great authors
I've read most of Singer's literature and would rate this book towards the top of my list.I do feel that the theme of his novels has a similar tone.Personally, I think that Singer is one of the better authors out there.I would recommend someone reading Enemies, a Love Story if you enjoyed this book.

want to know about a great book?
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"
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 wordsare 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
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

'Short Friday' One of mankind's most beautiful stories
The title- story of this collection is one of Singer's finest stories and one of the most beautiful I know.
It tells of a childless couple who live in deep love and joy with each other. And this as they pray and dream for a child of that love. The story tells of their preparations for Shabbat in the winter when Shabbat comes in very early (Thus:Short Friday).
I will not say anything further than this.
Read this story and know the pleasure of truly great literature.

Now What?
What a pity.In finishing "Short Friday", I have now read all books in English by the author Isaac Bashevis Singer.I guess there are some children's books of his that I haven't read yet and there is always the hope of some new works of his being translated from Yiddish to English.However, I don't know what sort of literary estate he has left behind so I will have to content myself with reading everything over again.

As for "Short Friday", this was a good collection of some of the many short stories Isaac B. Singer has written over the years.I would rate it a 4.5 if there were such a choice on the scale.About half of the stories in this volumne deal with the supernatural which is a populat subject of the author's.There is a wonderful little story of spiritual devotion in "I Place my Reliance on No Man".The title story is a moving tale of love at the end of life.However, the masterpiece of this book is the story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy".I had read this story in the "Collected Short Stories of Isaac Singer" but it was well worth reading again.Many people may be familiar with the Barbara Streisand movie "Yentl" which is based on this story of a young woman who pretends to be a young man so that she can study the holy books.It is one of the author's best works.

Well, every collection of short stories by Singer is a joy to read because you never know what's coming next.This is one of the better collections and a good place to begin if you haven't read anything by the author before.On the other hand, it's not a bad one to finish with if you've already read everything else I.B. Singer has written. ... Read more