A crown of feathers and other stories

Mazeltov! I'm not a great short story fan, but this works almost like a novel. We get a multi-layered picture of Polish-Yiddish-Jewish-American-Israeli life. peopled by artistic, intellectual, eccentric characters, sometimes superstitious, some learned or devout, replete with human foibles and the traces an ancient culture. Mostly it is light-hearted, ironic, even the Holocaust comes across as not much more than an inconvenience, until the last story which hits hard. This world is close enough to my own (integrated German-Jewish, with its own Diaspora) to feel familiar yet different.

I appreciated these stories and was enlightened regarding different practices and meanings of ritual in Judaism. Many of the stories were quite similar. In some, women were respected, but in others they were presented as either villains or dismissed. The portrayal of immigrants was illuminating. I was impressed by the wealth of publications available in Yiddish.

I’m just not a magic person. Unless ‘wand’ has an obvious coarse connotation, I don’t want one in my book. I don’t want devils, demons or invisible crowns of feathers in pillows. I don’t care if the spell is portrayed in an elegant way by Singer or a basic way for children by Rowling. I hereby give up on Singer, this is my second stab at him and I’m not finishing this one. This despite the fact that it isn’t all magic driven. The second story ‘A Day in Coney Island’ avoids all that – and I know, the magic realist clique are going to jump all over that statement and claim this story for themselves too. Well, I don’t think coins coming out of slots counts as magic. So there.

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3441. A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (read May 5, 2001) Singer won the Nobel prize for literature in 1978. This book of short stories was a co-winner of the National Book award for fiction in 1973. There are 24 stories, all translated from Yiddish into English. I enjoyed the stories, though few make explicit points in the way old-fashioned short stories used to do. But most of the characters are weird, and there are frequent references to occult or superstitious events. This brings to 40 the National Book Award fiction winners I've read, leaving 13 unread. Probably the best story in the book, I concluded, was one called "The Briefcase" which I thought powerful and reminding of Kafka.

Short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer