Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in Poland in 1904, emigrated to New York in 1935, when he began writing in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward. He is the author of many novels and stories and winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature. Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus.
Sam Palka sat on the sofa—stocky, a tuft of white hair on each side of his bald head, his face red, with bushy brows and bloodshot eyes that changed from pale blue to green to yellow. A cigar stuck out between his lips. His belly protruded like that of a woman in late pregnancy. He wore a navy-blue jacket, green pants, brown shoes, a shirt with purple stripes, and a silk tie on which was painted the head of a lion. Sam Palka himself looked to me like a lion by which by some magic had turned into a rich man in New York, a Maecenas to Yiddish writers, a supporter of the Yiddish theater, president of an old-age home in Bronx, the treasurer of a society that supported orphans in Israel.
Talking to me, Sam Palka shouted as though I were deaf. He lifted a thick manuscript from the coffee table and yelled, ‘Over a thousand pages, huh! And this is not one-hundredth part of what I could have written. But fix it up the way it is.’
‘I will do what I can.
‘Money doesn’t matter. Even if I should live a thousand years, I have enough. I will pay you three thousand dollars for the editing, and when the book comes out and they write about it in the papers I will give you—what do they call it? – a bonus. But make it tasty. I can’t read the books writers bring me—three or four lines of a novel and you have to fight to stay awake. In my day a book grabbed you. You began to read a novel and couldn’t put it down, because you wanted to know what happened. Dieneson, Spector, Seifert! And there were thoughts that took you who knows where. They contained history, too. Samson and Delilah, Jepthah’s daughter, Bar Kochba. They hit the spot. Today you read half a book and you still don’t know what it’s about. These scribblers write of love, but they know as much of love as I know of what’s going on on the moon. How should they know? They sit all day long and half the night in the Café Royal and argue about how great they are. They have sour milk and ink in their veins, not blood. I haven’t forgotten Yiddish. The man I dictated this book to tried to correct me all the time; he didn’t like my Polish Yiddish. But he didn’t bother me. I would dictate an episode and he would ask, ‘How can that be. It’s not realistic.’ He came from Ishishok, some godforsaken village, and to him what he hadn’t experienced didn’t exist—a bookworm, an idiot.
‘Now, I want you to know that even though I dictated over one thousand pages I had to leave out the main thing. I could not describe it because the heroine is alive and she reads. She does one thing in her life—she reads. She has heard of all today’s writers. Wherever a new book can be found, she gets it and reads it from cover to cover. My life wouldn’t be worth living if I were to publish the truth and she should learn about it. What I am going to tell you can be written only after my death. But who is there to do it? You are still a young man, you know your way around, and when I kick the bucket I want you to add this story to the book. Without it the whole thing isn’t worth a damn. I will provide for your additional work in my will.
(continued)
I love this story. This hilarious portrait of everyday Main Street characters rings as true today as it did when it was first published back then. The basics are the same and how little things change.
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