Library of America Isaac Bashevis Singer Edition

In the wake of his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer published several volumes of short stories in collections that mingled recent work with previously untranslated stories written in Yiddish decades earlier. Stretching back to “The Jew from Babylon,” a story first published in 1932, and gathering tales such as “Brother Beetle” and “There are No Coincidences” from the 1960s, the works collected in this Library of America volume, the third of three, serve as a retrospective view of Singer’s achievement as a storyteller.

Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah also contains ten stories published in English translation for the first time, selected from the extensive collection of Singer’s papers at the University of Texas. Ranging from “Between Shadows,” an evocative, naturalistic sketch set in Warsaw, to the bittersweet melodrama “Morris and Timma,” to the beguiling fable “Hershele and Hanele, or The Power of a Dream.” These stories enrich our understanding of Singer as a writer. The volume also includes “The Bird,” “My Adventures as an Idealist,” “and “Exes,” stories published in magazines that were not included in any of Singer’s collections. Complementing the seventy-eight stories gathered here is the introduction to Gifts (1985), a version of a lecture Singer had delivered since the early 1960s—sometimes called “Why I Write as I Do”—which illuminates his biography, philosophical outlook, and literary aims.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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, fêted 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.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Beginning with “Gimpel the Fool,” the story that brought Isaac Bashevis Singer to prominence in America in the 1950s, this Library of America volume is the first of three gathering most of Singer’s short fiction. These stories were published in English in the versions he called his “second originals,” translations that he supervised and on which he himself often collaborated, revising his Yiddish texts as he worked.

Born in 1904 into a family of rabbis, Singer grew up in a devout household in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, but he also spent time in the villages and market towns of eastern Poland, most notably Bilgoray, where he took refuge with his mother and brother during World War I. He had firsthand exposure to forms of Jewish folk culture that were destroyed by the Nazis, and many of his works testify to the richness of that annihilated world. In his stories set in Poland, Singer drew upon vernacular traditions for tales imbued with a wild, sometimes mischievous, often disturbing supernaturalism that was an outgrowth of local storytelling but containing dark undercurrents born of his own concerns and obsessions. At the same time, his skeptical but never dismissive engagement with religion and spirituality—and the opposing forces of secularism—enabled him to take part in the creative ferment of Jewish modernism but also distance himself from its politics and literary methods.

In addition to “Gimpel the Fool,” this volume—drawn from Singer’s first four English-language collections of stories originally published in the 1950s and 1960s—contains some of Singer’s most beloved tales: “The Spinoza of Market Street,” “The Gentleman from Cracow,” “Taibele and Her Demon,” and “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” the basis of a hit Broadway play and the film Yentl.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.