Yentl the Yeshiva Boy
and Other Stories: Including Short Friday
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A collection of short stories by a profoundly gifted writer who can deftly immerse the reader in a rich sensory experience of bygone days.
First published as Short Friday and Other Stories, Singer's 1965 collection presents a profoundly gifted writer who can deftly immerse the reader in a rich sensory experience of both bygone and modern life. The collection features some of Singer's most provocative early stories, including "Blood," "Taibele and Her Demon," "The Last Demon," and "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," which was later adapted for the screen by Barbara Streisand. One moment the reader has goosebumps, the next her heart is inspired to the heights of human inspiration, as each story takes its twists and turns to offer new insights into the richness of life and its wonders.
"Incomparable, inimitable, indescribable." —Newsweek
"Singer is a master at telling a story." —Saturday Review
"Singer shuns sentimentality and delights in the exotic." —Slavic Review
About the Author
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Yiddish-language novelist and storyteller who chronicled Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America with humor, mysticism, and moral depth. Born in Poland to a rabbinic family, he emigrated to New York in 1935 and wrote for the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) for decades. His novels, memoirs, and short stories give voice to the shtetl, the Hasidic court, and the world lost to the Holocaust. His characters, whether rabbis, skeptics, dybbuks, or ordinary people wrestling with faith and desire, embody the tensions between tradition and modernity at the heart of Jewish experience.
Singer received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” He won two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974) and Newbery Honors in 1968 and 1969. His Jewish literary honors include the Louis Lamed Prize (1950 and 1956) and Israel’s S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal (1975). The Jewish Book Council selected his novel The Slave for its Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award, the council’s top prize for English-language fiction of Jewish interest, in recognition of 1962 publications. A master of the short story, he is remembered for classics such as “Gimpel the Fool,” translated into English by Saul Bellow.