Isaac Bashevis Singer's life - and work

Move ahead to some of the later stories in the Library of America collection of early I B Singer stories - from the collection Short Friday - read two each yet another weird take on love, sex, obsession, marriage - in the first one a woman whose husband has deserted her receives regular visitations from the village jokester who pretends to be an impish spirit or a devil; for many months they have regular sexual encounters, and, within the logic of the story, she always believes he's a devil and never figures out that he's just a poor schlemiel from town. Not at all likely, right? But in fact we can sort of see around the edges of the story and figure that of course she knew but by accepting his self-proclamations she makes their sexual relationship a little more acceptable and less dangerous: to recognize him as a fellow villager would entail all sorts of commitments and expectations. The end is very fine and odd, as the "devil" takes ill and dies and she joins the funeral procession, thinking, or at least pretending, that she's honoring a lonely miscast from her village. Another story from this collection, Small and Big, or some such title, is about a man of very diminutive stature who marries a large woman - and she's mean to him, eventually ridiculing and humiliating him, which leads to his gradual withdrawal from their relationship, and to his death - another of the very sad and cruel Singer stories. I read quite a bit of the detailed chronology of Singer's life in the excellent LoA notes and was surprised to see how extremely literate he was even in his early years - publishing translations of a wide variety of authors, including Hamsun and Mann. He was also quite the unconventional "player," involved in numerous affairs, one of which led to a child - he wrote about this quite openly in one of his memoirs. For those who think of him as a poor, misplaced refugee, it's important to note that he came to the U.S in the '30s and became a citizen in the '40s and knew English well enough to work on his own translations with writers who did not read Yiddish. He was part of a thriving and prosperous - though now long gone - Yiddish cultural elite and diaspora. BTW, I've known that his older and revered brother I J Singer was a very successful novelist who died too young - but didn't know their sister (Hinde?) was also a novelist: material here for someone's dissertation - along the Woolfian lines, if Sh. had a sister: cf James et al. (and in the reverse, the Brontes).