Isaac bashevis singer

Read a few more stories in first vol of library of america I B Singer collected stories and trying to get a sense of the village life (of his youth?) as he portrays it. What are the elements? On the surface of course the ever present poverty as well as the social inequalities, the miserliness of the wealthy who are wealthy only in relation to the poverty around them, the constant looming of death w so many dying young either in infancy - not unusual for family of 7 w 1 surviving and many widowed and multiply remarried, the sense that everyone knows everyone else's business and that the narratives could be told in a communal first person plural (as w Garcia Marques a generation later) - the great story gimpel the fool the exception in that he is a narrator w a strong voice and distinct character not speaking for the village but for himself as an outcast from the village. Little or no reference to world beyond the village and rabbis a separate almost divine breed apart spiritual political and intellectual leaders but for all that a maybe sometimes looked down upon as too privileged remote and uninvolved perhaps like god(s).

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