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cases, Singer has a taste for the sensational, the profane, and the fantastic: he favors shocking anecdotes of cross-dressing Hasids, daring escapes from Nazi Germany, touching descriptions of bizarrely loyal lovers, and supernatural tales of devils and demons. His best-known story, “Gimpel the Fool,” which Saul Bellow translated in 1953, is a fitting representation of his oeuvre: set in a shtetl, it describes a pure-hearted simpleton who is abused by a sinful woman, and, rising above the temptation to revenge himself on the community, winds up a wandering Jew, waiting for the world to come. While it resonates with notions of Diaspora and destruction, the story takes seriously the needs, desires, and beliefs of one simple, even pathetic man. In a sense, the hundreds of other stories Singer wrote simply reproduce, across continents and decades, this remarkable attention and sympathy. The wonderful 2004 edition of Singer’s collected stories covers almost 3,000 pages, but even these three volumes cannot be called complete, because Singer published many short pieces under pseudonyms over the decades, and an absolute gathering of all his published works in translation seems unlikely. For many readers, a smaller grouping of stories, such as The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982), will be a sufficient introduction, and this threevolume set should fulfill even Singer’s most ardent fans. Further reading: As one of the most celebrated American Jewish writers and a master of Yiddish style, Singer has been the subject of innumerable biographies, studies, and profiles; a good place to start is Janet Hadda’s contribution (1997). Singer’s memoirs, published in volumes such as In My Father’s Court (1966), are as entertaining as his fictional works. His first novel, Satan in Goray (1935), about a false messiah in the 17th century, should not be missed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122pThe World to Come By Dara Horn W. W. NORTON, 2006. 315 PAGES. Unlike most of her peers in the ranks of young, celebrated Jewish writers, who fret primarily about their ignorance and ambivalence about the textual and social traditions of their ancestors, Dara Horn knows her stuff cold. A Ph.D. in modern Jewish literature, Horn reads everything from the Torah to I. B. Singer in the original, and she brings her commitment to Jewish texts to bear in her novels. In fact, she admits to being less conscious of how English works in [her second book, The World to Come,] than how Hebrew or Yiddish work in it, since English is more medium than subject.” The result is an idiosyncratic book, part novel and part anthology, which reads at times as if it were being translated from a lost Jewish language. In fact, Horn interpolates into her narrative a series of stories in translation by Yiddish masters including Sholem Aleichem, Itzik Manger, Nachman of Bratslav, 165 Titles Moyshe Nadir, Mani Leyb, and I. L. Peretz as well as providing condensed fictionalizations of the lives of the world-famous painter Marc Chagall and the neglected Soviet symbolist writer Der Nister (“The Hidden One”). To squeeze all of this in, Horn’s imagination leaps through time and space, limning scenes on the outskirts of Moscow and in Vietnam as well as an otherworldly, fantastic place where people drink books like wine. The nub of this wildly expansive plot is the former child prodigy Ben Ziskind, who steals a painting by Chagall off the wall of the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, and it is in the course of explicating Ziskind’s family history and the painting’s provenance that Horn ranges so widely. Before she is done, she touches on terrorism in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the situation of Russian Jewish immigrants as well as on Ben’s potential love life; and if not every strand of the story weaves seamlessly together, that is beside the point. The grand ambitions of The World to Come are themselves energizing. Horn has been honored with just about every Jewish writing prize in the United States; more impressive, she also made Granta’s prestigious Best of Young American Novelists list in 2007. As she was only 29 when her second novel appeared, and has all the credentials she’ll need to settle into a comfortable academic post (if she wants to), there is reason to hope that Horn will have a long and productive career. Even more encouraging, she has an enormous, mostly unknown archive of Yiddish and Hebrew modernist writing from which to draw inspiration. Further...

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