More Stories from My Father's Court (16 page)

Authors: Isaac Bashevis Singer

BOOK: More Stories from My Father's Court

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When Mother came into the room, he said, “In
shul
, I'll have to recite the blessing thanking God for saving me.”

NOVELS

The Manor [I. The Manor II. The Estate]
The Family Moskat â¢ The Magician of Lublin
Satan in Goray â¢ The Slave â¢ Enemies, A Love Story
Shosha â¢ The Penitent â¢ The King of the Fields
Scum â¢ The Certifcate â¢ Meshugah â¢ Shadows on the Hudson

STORIES

Gimpel the Fool â¢ A Friend of Kafka â¢ Short Friday
The SÃ©ance â¢ The Spinoza of Market Street â¢ Passions
A Crown of Feathers â¢ Old Love â¢ The Image
The Death of Methuselah

MEMOIRS

In My Father's Court
â¢
Love and Exile

FOR CHILDREN

A Day of Pleasure â¢ The Fools of Chelm
Mazel and Shlimazel or The Milk of a Lioness
When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw
A Tale of Three Wishes â¢ Elijah the Slave
Joseph and Koza or The Sacrifice to the Vistula
Alone in the Wild Forest â¢ The Wicked City
Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus
Why Noah Chose the Dove â¢ The Power of Light
The Golem â¢ The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China

COLLECTIONS

The Collected Stories â¢ Stories for Children
An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader

Nobel Lecture

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

MORE STORIES FROM MY FATHER'S COURT

The author of more than forty books now available in twenty-nine languages, Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Radzymin, Poland, in 1904. The son and grandson of rabbis (and himself a rabbinical student from 1920 to 1927), Singer eventually followed in the more secular footsteps of his older brother, Israel Joshua, a novelist. In 1935, the same year he published his first novel,
Satan in Goray,
I. B. Singer left the Yiddish literary community in Warsaw to join his brother on the staff of
The Jewish Daily Forward.
Until his death in 1991, Singer retained his close association with New York's oldest Jewish newspaper by contributing columns, reviews, stories, and essays in Yiddish to its pages. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, and twice won the National Book Award.

Curt Leviant has translated the work of Sholom Aleichem and Chaim Grade and is the prizewinning author of five novels:
The Yemenite Girl, Passion in the Desert, The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah, Partita in Venice, and Diary of an Adulterous Woman.

Notes

Tevuos Shor,
a widely used text containing laws pertaining to ritual slaughtering.
Yoreh De'ah,
the section of the
Code of Law
that deals with ritual slaughtering. The
Be'er Hetev
and
Pri Megadim,
commentaries to the
Code of Law
generally included in that text. (Author)

The opponents of Hasidim.

Between the world wars Warsaw had two Jewish cemeteries: the older one in Praga (on the other side of the Vistula River) for the poor and the other at the end of Genshe Street, where the richer people were buried. (Author)

A Kohen, a member of the priestly class, from the tribe of Levi, is not permitted to marry a divorcee or a widow.

The Book of the Covenant,
a traditional book popular at the end of the eighteenth century that dealt with various aspects of science and philosophy.

Toomtoom,
a Talmudic word signifying a nonvirile man.

Yom-tov Algazi (1727-1802), a famous rabbi, was the author of
The Laws of Yom-tov
, a commentary on
Bekhoros
. (Author)

The stories in this collection first appeared as newspaper columns in Yiddish in
The Jewish Daily Forward
between the years 1955 and 1960.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Published in 2000 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Cover photograph by Roman Vishniac,
The Private Entrance to the Study of Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna,
1937, gelatin silver print, Â© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy of the International Center of Photography, New York.

eISBN 9781466810082

First eBook Edition : January 2012

First paperback edition, 2001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1904â

[Essays. English. Selections]

More stories from my father's court /by Isaac Bashevis Singer; translated by Curt Leviant.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-374-52798-9 (pbk.)

1. Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1904- Childhood and youth. 2. Rabbinical courtsâPolandâWarsaw. 3. Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1904-

Translations in English. I. Title

PJ5129.S49 A25 2000