Status Updates From Gimpel the Fool

Im not reading the copy i have at home because im too scared to break it

THE BLACK WEDDING

The most astonishing story. A deep dark midnight story. A horror story.

When a daughter’s parents are taken by dybbuks her marriage to a rabbi’s son is arranged. But when she first sees him under the wedding canopy she realizes immediately that he is a monster.

She cannot escape. His entire family is composed of demons. And they maliciously and gleefully prevail over her.

THE SPINOZA OF MARKET STREET

A shriveled old loner, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, hides away in an attic room reading Spinoza’s ethics, cutting himself off from society. But when a woman steps into his world, marries him, then appears in a silk nightgown on their wedding night, the natural laws of cause and effect Spinoza espoused take effect and the old man rises from the dead.

ESTHER KREINDEL THE SECOND
Magical realism.
When a well-loved wife and mother dies she returns in the body of a fourteen-year-old girl, who then begins to mature in a rapid fashion, mentally and physically. She goes to the grieving husband and children of the woman who died and takes her place, an identical copy. Esther Kreindel becomes Esther Kreindel the Second.

GIMPEL THE FOOL
Everyone deceives Gimpel. His wife, the devil, his apprentice, everyone. Yet he plows on without rancor, grudges or bitterness, though he has plenty of reasons to harbor all of that. Well read and well written in very much a “Tevye Yiddishy” kind of way.

Four stories: Gimpel the Fool; The Spinoza of Market Street; Esther Kreindel the Second; The Black Wedding.

Not my first reading of Singer’s work but most of these stories are new.

I’ll begin with Gimpel.

The audiobook is really fun, but there are only 4 stories. I’m reading the rest