New year new stack o' books, as they say. Or as I say, at least.
I picked up this slim mass market paperback, printed in 1968, from a used bookstore in Deland, knowing absolutely nothing about the author or the stories but thinking it sounded interesting. And it was, mostly.
These stories have a dark sense of humor, and are often about the kind of loneliness one feels when surrounded by people and weighed down by duty.
A list of the Stories Within:
1. The Seance
2. The Slaughterer
3. The Dead Fiddler
4. The Lecture
5. Cockadoodledoo
6. The Plagiarist
7. Zeitl and Rickel
8. The Warehouse
9. Henne Fire
10. Getzel the Monkey
11. Yanda
12. The Needle
13. Two Corpses Go Dancing
14. The Parrot
15. The Brooch
16. The Letter Writer
I dont have particularly strong feelings about these stories, but one thing i want to talk about is how they are permeated with an obstinate social conservatism: there is a uniting sensibility in all the stories that to express individuality, to go against the will of the community, is to be doomed. Seeking joy or even trying to avoid misery is not rewarded. Adherance to social normativity is the only way to peace. not happiness. Happiness is fleeting, often illusory. communal peace is what one should hope for.
Its fucking depressing, is what it is.
A common refrain that characters express after someone experiences misfortune or does something terrible is that "it is fated." Everything that happens was always destined to happen. I felt that this sentiment was meant to be received with a degree of irony, but it was often hard to tell.
In an attempt to understand if this was meant to be subversive I looked up Isaac Bashevis Singer's Wikipedia page. The section about his work is a bit of a mess, by the way, clearly written by someone with opinions on his influences but not the typical editorial style of Wikipedia. It seems he had a bit of a complicated relationship with his faith, which helped clarify what was going on in stories like The Warehouse, where God is a distant presence even in Heaven. In stories like Henne Fire though, the demons, at least, are close. The Wikipedia article credits this to his inability to reconcile a loving and compassionate god with the crimes against humanity he escaped when he left Poland in 1935. Perhaps this is where the irony creeps in from, when expressing a belief in fate.
I dont think i would recommend this collection. The prose is well written, but the stories have a kind of rambling quality: often several pages will be dedicated to describing a character before the story about whatever misfortune actually starts. Still, it was interesting to read something from a yiddish writer, and to learn a bit about his life.
