Publisher's Synopsis
By the time Isaac Bashevis Singer published the three short-story collections gathered in this Library of America volume - A Friend of Kafka (1970), A Crown of Feathers (1973), and Passions (1975) - he had made his home in America for nearly four decades. Earning his living as a columnist for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), he had risen from nearly complete anonymity outside of his Yiddish readership to international celebrity as 'the last of the great Yiddish fiction writers,' as Anzia Yzierska once called him. Awarded prizes, feted in the United States and abroad, eagerly sought for lectures and interviews, he had brought about this remarkable transformation primarily though the translation of his stories. Often collaborating with his translators, Singer intended the English version of his stories to be regarded not as diminished approximations of his Yiddish stories but as works shaped by the author in the language of his adopted homeland. The sixty-five
