First published in 1957 by Noonday Press, Isaac Bashevis Singer's first collection of stories, Gimpel the Fool, is a landmark work that has attracted international acclaim. The title story follows the exploits of Gimpel, an ingenuous baker who is universally deceived but who declines to retaliate against his tormentors. Gimpel and the protagonists of the other stories all inhabit the distinctive pre-World War II shtetls of Poland and, beyond that, the larger world created by Singer's unforgettable prose. Praise: "These stories are a unique blend of lyric mysticism and earthy realism in characters that are universal human symbols of the worldly and the supernatural. Fantasy is Singer's surest guide to truth in literature." - Anzia Yezierska, The New York Times Review of Books "Extraordinarily beautiful... It's the integrity of the human imagination that Singer conveys so beautifully." - Alfred Kazin, The New Leader "Singer is a genius. He has total command of his imagined world." - Irving Howe, The New Republic "A peerless storyteller, Singer restores the sheer enchantment with story, with outcome, with what-happens-next that has been denied most readers since their adolescence." - David Boroff, Saturday Review

Nobel Prize winner Isacc Bashevis Singer wrote both autobiographical and fantasy tales for children which are deeply rooted in the lost cultural tradition of his native Poland. This very special collection combines the stories he wrote of his childhood with exuberant and timeless tales that can be included among the world's great folk literature.

NY 1950 1st (stated) Knopf. Hardcover thick octavo., 611pp., Red cloth backstrip with ivory marbled boards. VG++ light toning of end papers; text clean and bright. VG+ DJ. no owner marks. A sound and attractive copy of this true Masterpiece by Nobel laureate.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

As messianic zeal sweeps through medieval Poland, the Jews of Goray divide between those who, like the Rabbi, insist that no one can "force the end" and those who follow the messianic pretender Sabbatai Zevi. But as hysteria and depravity reign free, it becomes clear that it is not the Messiah who has come to Goray. Praise: "Beautifully written by one of the masters of Yiddish prose, and beautifully translated, ''Satan in Goray'' is folk material transmuted into literature." - The New York Times Review of Books "A gripping parable of reason versus revelation, hysteria in the face of apocalypse" - Guardian "Whatever religion his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality." - Ted Hughes, New York Review of Books "Singer sets scenes with such vividness that there is almost a smell to his books, the smell of poverty and guttering candles and decaying lives and decaying souls. - Observer "His storytelling powers are so immense, so natural. He has more creative confidence than any living writer." - Financial Times

Slægtsroman.

An authentic literary great, Singer was an author whose extraordinary talents won him a worldwide audience. And with this impressive novel, he proved that he was at the height of his creative power until his recent death at age 86. Scum evokes the teeming life of 1906 Warsaw's backstreets. Max Barabander, distraught over the recent death of his son, flees the life of wealth and respectability he has attained in Buenos Aires, to return to the poverty and shadows of his youth spent in Warsaw. He fears impotence which leads him to the pursuit of mindless sex with five different women who view him only as an escape from their drab lives. The author recalls the teeming life of 1906 Jewish Warsaw in this impressive novel of changing mores and values. . .

It's 1922 and David Bendiger, an aspiring eighteen-and-a-half-year-old writer, arrives in Warsaw, penniless and homeless. His only contacts are Sonya, a young woman with whom he has had amorous dealings in the village they have left, and a Zionist functionary who informs him he has qualified for a certificate permitting him to emigrate to Palestine. But in order to make the journey David must enter into a fictitious marriage with a woman so eager to get to Palestine that she will pay all the expenses. While David waits for his certificate, he becomes involved not only with Sonya but with Edusha, the sexually avant-garde Communist Party member in whose apartment he finds a temporary haven; and with Minna, the well-to-do young woman who wants to join her fiance in Palestine and agrees to "marry" David. Grappling with romantic, political, and youthful turmoil, David also confronts his literary future and religious past when his older brother - a writer disillusioned by a recent sojourn in Russia - and his father, an Orthodox rabbi, both turn up in Warsaw. The Certificate was serialized in Yiddish in 1967, but may have been written much earlier. The translator, Leonard Wolf, in a postscript calls it "a very young man's book" and "certainly the most playful of Singer's long fictions", with its alternately comic and poignant shifts in plot. Young David's passions for women, philosophizing, Jewish religious speculation, and Walter Mitty-like fantasies make The Certificate a captivating novel in the great tradition of a master storyteller.