The Collected Stories

PENGUIN CLASSICS

    Published by the Penguin Group
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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

Author’s Note

    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