Old love

Set in various parts of the globe and permeated with references to Jewish life in prewar Poland, these 18 stories are quintessantial Singer, with their characteristic mixture of homely details and metaphysical omens, cosmic coincidences and insoluble dilemmas, dybbuks and angels, curses and enchantments. His characters dream and have vision, lust, pray, exist in the mundane world, but have intimations of a higher reality. The three stories "Elka and Meir," "The Bus," and "The Manuscript" are exceptionally powerful.