A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Summary
Twenty four stories, and Singer's two worlds sit in them side by side: the vanished Jewish Poland of dybbuks, disputations and market town scandals, and the cafeterias of the West Side of Manhattan, where the survivors of that world drink coffee and tell each other stories neither of them can verify.
The title story is among the best things he wrote. Akhsa, an orphaned Polish Jewish heiress raised by a freethinking grandfather and a pious grandmother, is pulled between their ghosts after their deaths, each whispering opposite instructions: convert, marry the Polish squire, says one voice; return, repent, marry the pious scholar, says the other. She obeys both, ruinously, and the story's famous emblem, a crown of feathers discovered sewn inside a pillow, perfect and inexplicable, stands for the problem underneath all Singer's fiction: the truth may be real, but every sign of it can be forged.
Around Akhsa's tragedy the collection ranges through possession and stubborn love, cabbalists and con men, and the late New York stories in which an ageing Yiddish writer, transparently Singer, is buttonholed by readers with impossible tales, the teller and the told trading places.
The prose, translated from his Yiddish by Singer himself with Laurie Colwin and other collaborators, is plain, quick and completely assured; the events are anything but.
Around three hundred and forty pages, best read a few stories at a sitting.
Best for readers who want the folk tale turned to modern purposes, by the last master of a murdered language.
Historical Context & Significance
A Crown of Feathers shared the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction with Gravity's Rainbow, and the split is the list's most delicious: the most public prank in prize history, Pynchon's comedian proxy, sharing the stage with a courtly Yiddish storyteller past seventy. Asked often why he wrote in a dying language, Singer gave the answer he would make famous at the 1978 Nobel banquet: he liked ghost stories, and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language.
Isaac Bashevis Singer had arrived from Warsaw in 1935 and written in Yiddish ever since, serialising novels in the Jewish Daily Forward and translating his own work into English with trusted collaborators. The Nobel Prize followed in 1978, its citation honoring an art rooted in Polish Jewish culture that brought universal human conditions to life.
His brother Israel Joshua and sister Esther were novelists too, a family of the literature whose world the Holocaust erased; his stories are its afterlife.