Short Friday [antikvár]

^Author's Note I wish to express my gratitude to Robert Giroux for editing the whole manuscript, and to Cecil Hemley, now head of Ohio University Press, for revising parts of the translation in collaboration with me. Mirra Ginsburg, Elizabeth Pollet, Elaine Gottlieb, Ruth Whitman, Marion Magid, Ghana Faerstein, Martha Glicklich, Joel Blocker, Roger Klein, and my nephew, Joseph Singer, all deserve my thanks for then: devotion in bringing this collection to the American reader. I dedicate these pages to the blessed memory of my brother, I. J. Singer, author of The Brothers Ashkenazi, Yoshe Kalb etc. who helped me to come to this country and was my teacher and master in literature. I am still leaming from him and his work. Isaac Bashevis Singer Talbele and Her Demon fn the town of Lashnik, not far from Lublin, there lived a man and his wife. His name was Chaim Nossen, hers Taibele. They had no children. Not that the marriage was barren; Taibele had borne her husband a son and two daughters, but all three had died in infancy—one of whooping cough, one of scarlet fever, and one of diphtheria. After that Taibele's womb closed up, and nothing availed: neither prayers, nor spells, nor potions. Grief drove Chaim Nossen to withdraw from the world. He kept apart from his wife, stopped eating meat, and no longer slept at home, but on a bench in the prayer house. Taibele owned a dry-goods store, inherited from her parents, and she sat there all day, with a yardstick on her right, a pair of 9