Authors: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Collected Stories
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1904 in a village near Warsaw, Poland and grew up in the city’s Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter. Although he initially considered becoming a rabbi like his father, Singer abandoned his religious studies in his twenties in favour of pursuing a career as a writer. He found a job as a proofreader for a Yiddish literary magazine and began to publish book reviews and short stories. In 1935, as the Nazi threat in neighbouring Germany grew increasingly ominous, Singer moved to the United States of America. He settled in New York, where he worked as a journalist for a Yiddish-language newspaper and in 1940 married a German-Jewish refugee.
Although Singer published many novels, children’s books, memoirs, essays and articles, he is best known as a writer of short stories. In 1978, he won the Nobel Prize, and he died in Florida in 1991.
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First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1982
Published in Penguin Books 1984
Published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1953, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982
Renewal copyright © Isaac Bashevis Singer 1981, 1982
All rights reserved
Many of these stories originally appeared in
The New Yorker
. ‘Gimpel the Fool’ and ‘The Little Shoemakers’ originally appeared in
A Treasury of Yiddish Stories
, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, reprinted with the permission of Viking Penguin Inc.
The moral right of the author and translators has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196862-9
I
T IS
difficult for me to comment on the choice of the forty-seven stories in this collection, selected from more than a hundred. Like some Oriental father with a harem full of women and children, I cherish them all.
In the process of creating them, I have become aware of the many dangers that lurk behind the writer of fiction. The worst of them are: 1. The idea that the writer must be a sociologist and a politician, adjusting himself to what are called social dialectics. 2. Greed for money and quick recognition. 3. Forced originality—namely, the illusion that pretentious rhetoric, precious innovations in style, and playing with artificial symbols can express the basic and ever-changing nature of human relations, or reflect the combinations and complications of heredity and environment. These verbal pitfalls of so-called “experimental” writing have done damage even to genuine talent; they have destroyed much of modern poetry by making it obscure, esoteric, and charmless. Imagination is one thing, and the distortion of what Spinoza called “the order of things” is something else entirely. Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself.
Although the short story is not in vogue nowadays, I still believe that it constitutes the utmost challenge to the creative writer. Unlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy digressions, flashbacks, and loose construction, the short story must aim directly at its climax. It must possess uninterrupted tension and suspense. Also, brevity is its very essence. The short story must have a definite plan; it cannot be what in literary jargon is called “a slice of life.” The masters of the short story, Chekhov, Maupassant, as well as the sublime scribe of the Joseph story in the Book of Genesis, knew exactly where they were going. One can read them over and over again and never get bored. Fiction in general should never become analytic. As a matter of fact, the writer of fiction should not even try to dabble in psychology and its various isms. Genuine literature informs while it entertains. It manages to be both clear and profound. It has the magical power of merging causality with purpose, doubt with faith, the passions of the flesh with the yearnings of the soul. It is unique and general, national and universal, realistic and mystical. While it tolerates commentary by others, it should never try to explain itself. These obvious truths must be emphasized, because false criticism and pseudo-originality have created a state of literary amnesia in our generation. The zeal for messages has made many writers forget that storytelling is the raison d’être of artistic prose.
For readers who would like me to say something “more personal,” I quote here a few passages (though not in the order in which they were written) from a recent memoir of mine: “My isolation from everything remained the same. I had surrendered myself to melancholy and it had taken me prisoner. I had presented Creation with an ultimatum: ‘Tell me your secret, or let me perish.’ I had to run away from myself. But how? And where? I dreamed of a humanism and ethics the basis of which would be a refusal to justify all the evils the Almighty has sent us and is preparing to bestow upon us in the future. At its best, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while.”
I am still working hard to make this “while” worthwhile.
I have had the good fortune to work with three highly talented and true editors, Robert Giroux, Cecil Hemley, and Rachel MacKenzie. I dedicate this collection to Rachel MacKenzie’s sacred memory. She was blessed with wisdom, charm, and humility, and embued with a perfect understanding of literature—a great editor and, more than that, a great person.
I.B.S.
July 6, 1981
I
I
AM
Gimpel the fool. I don’t think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that’s what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny, and fool. The last name stuck. What did my foolishness consist of? I was easy to take in. They said, “Gimpel, you know the rabbi’s wife has been brought to childbed?” So I skipped school. Well, it turned out to be a lie. How was I supposed to know? She hadn’t had a big belly. But I never looked at her belly. Was that really so foolish? The gang laughed and hee-hawed, stomped and danced and chanted a good-night prayer. And instead of the raisins they give when a woman’s lying in, they stuffed my hand full of goat turds. I was no weakling. If I slapped someone he’d see all the way to Cracow. But I’m really not a slugger by nature. I think to myself: Let it pass. So they take advantage of me.