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aliciagriggs's review
3.0
I find short stories are great for bath time reading, and I really enjoyed getting through this collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer, though it took ages! The style of his writing made it, on the whole, difficult for me to read a lot of pages at one time. It isn't what I would consider an easy read; it's intellectual.
My favourite stories are 'Gimpel the Fool', 'The Slaughterer', 'Yentl the Yeshiva Boy', and 'The Letter Writer'.
'The Slaughterer' and 'The Letter Writer' are my two favourite because they focus on our mindset towards animal. Singer has an obvious fondness towards animals, and makes readers question their use and abuse of animals.
As he wrote in the 'The Letter Writer', "they have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures are merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for animals it is an eternal Treblinka. And yet man demands compassion from heaven."
Powerful words, and all too true.
My favourite stories are 'Gimpel the Fool', 'The Slaughterer', 'Yentl the Yeshiva Boy', and 'The Letter Writer'.
'The Slaughterer' and 'The Letter Writer' are my two favourite because they focus on our mindset towards animal. Singer has an obvious fondness towards animals, and makes readers question their use and abuse of animals.
As he wrote in the 'The Letter Writer', "they have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures are merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for animals it is an eternal Treblinka. And yet man demands compassion from heaven."
Powerful words, and all too true.
extemporalli's review
An impressive collection comprising stories split between featuring rural Jewish communities in pre-WWII Poland and post-WWII Jewish immigrants in New York City, involving meditations on Jewishness, sin, and the devil. In total IBS offers a rather gloomy, fatalistic vision of the world which I enjoy- but my main caveat is that Singer is fairly misogynist, especially his earlier stories which conflate sin and sex and women in that classically conservative, traditional way. This improves later on, when he gets more forgiving towards sex, and the unhappy people who have it. One of my favourite passages in the collection, on a sexually promiscuous girl of one of the characters' youth:
Here's another quote:
Ah, IBS. Pretty good with those killa last lines.
Spoiler
"Oh, her father married her off to some dummy, a son of a rich Hasid, a follower of his rabbi's. My little kitten stood with him under the canopy pure and veiled as if she had never been touched. Why she would allow herself to be used this way is a riddle to me. Such females sometimes marry a fool so that they'll have someone to dupe easily. There is a great thrill in cheating - almost as much as in stealing. But you pay for everything. She died two years later in childbirth."
"So that's how it turned out?"
"Yes. Her husband, the lummox, had gone to his rabbi's and he lingered there for months. I was doing time in the Janov jail. Later, they transferred me to Lublin. That time I was innocent. I had been falsely accused. When I finally got out, Mindle was already in the other world."
"It was surely a punishment from God," Motke said.
"No."
It grew silent. Even the cricket had ceased its chirping. After a while Zeinvel said, "I haven't forgotten her. If there is a Gehenna, I want to lie next to her on one bed of nails."
Here's another quote:
Spoiler
Max Greitzer took her astral arm and they began to rise without purpose, without a destination. As they might have done from an airplane, they looked down at the earth and saw cities, rivers, fields, lakes - everything but human beings.
"Did you say something?" Liza asked.
And Max Greitzer answered. "Of all my disenchantments, immortality is the greatest."
Ah, IBS. Pretty good with those killa last lines.
riverlesbian's review
4.0
very different from any other books I've gotten to read but i felt very connected to the ideas as well
sabernar's review
Read some stories. Very good. Just not what I'm currently in the mood for.
menocchio's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
raehink's review
3.0
A collection of 47 short stories, selected by the author himself, including "The Seance," "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," and "Gimpel the Fool." Each story captures the flavor of Jewish culture. Singer won the Nobel Prize in 1978 and died in 1991.
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