News & Events

LARB presents Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “In the Beginning,” translated from the Yiddish by David Stromberg. This is the story’s first appearance in English. It is featured in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 18, Genius

THE VERY SAME DAY I moved into the small condominium apartment in Bal Harbour, I was told about my neighbor, Priscilla Levy Clark, who was a millionairess of eighty-plus, four times widowed and three times divorced.

In this non-kosher house, Reb Israel partook only of bread and tea, which he brewed in his own teapot on the small gas-stove. Occasionally, Basheleh, his granddaughter, would buy him herring and an onion or a radish.

Some writers begin to write with talent, quickly earn a reputation among readers and critics, and then are suddenly silenced forever. We had two such men at the Yiddish Writers’ Club in Warsaw.

This essay was adapt­ed from two arti­cles, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Yid­dish in the Forverts, deal­ing with ques­tions of cen­sor­ship in lit­er­a­ture: “ ​‘Inde­cent’ Lan­guage and Sex in Lit­er­a­ture” (April 21, 1963) and ​“Why Cen­sor­ship is Bad for Lit­er­a­ture” (July 10, 1966).

Since moving to the country, I find myself growing sleepy by ten o’clock at night. I retire at the same time as my parakeets and the chickens in the coop.

Editors’ Note: This story, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), was first published in Yiddish in 1970, and is appearing here in English translation for the first time.