Isaac Bashevis Singer SHOSHA First USA Edition
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Isaac Bashevis Singer SHOSHA First USA Edition
First USA edition, first print hardback of SHOSHA, by Isaac Bashevis Singer and published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 1978. Stated first printing.The book is in very good condition (clean orange/brown boards and bright red lettering on spine) with some minor wear to the dust jacket, which is not price clipped (rubbing/creasing to edges, bumping to corners, couple of tiny 'nicks' to top of spine, nothing drastic at all). Internally, the pages are clean and there are no tears and no inscriptions. There is slight splitting to the binding on the inside front board but there are no loose pages and the binding remains tight. Some age browning to inside boards and endpapers. Overall a very presentable item.
Isaac Bashevis Singer described this novel, his first in six years following Enemies, A Love Story (1972), as "a story of a few unique characters in unique circumstances" - the background being the 1930s in Warsaw, the years of Hitler's rise to power. The characters are the narrator, Aaron Greidinger, familiarly known as Tsutsik, an aspiring young writer, and his circle of bohemian friends. Chief among them is Dr Morris Feitelzohn, a member of the Writers' Club who, just when Tsutsik's life has reached its lowest point, introduces him to a rich American, Sam Dreiman, and his mistress, Betty Slonim, an actress. To further Betty's career, the American decides to put up the money for a play Tstutsik is writing, and the young man's life is suddenly transformed.
He finds himself emotionally involved with four women - Betty, who admires his talent; Celia, an older married woman he meets through Dr Feitelzohn; Tekla, a girl from the country who works as a maid in his new flat; and Dora the Marxist, an old flame with whom he is reconciled on the eve of her Soviet departure. "In all the novels I have read," Tsutsik tells himself, "the hero desired only one woman, but here I was lusting after the whole female gender." One spring day, walking with Betty through his old Krochmalna Street neighborhood, Tsutsik rediscovers his past - in the person of his childhood playmate, Shosha, still an innocent young woman. Tsutsik's and Shosha's subsequent fate and that of all the friends, revealed in an epilogue in Israel, rounds off this wonderful saga of human unpredictability, self-deception, and humor in the midst of tragedy.
Isaac Bashevis Singer celebrates the dignity, mystery and unexpected joy of living with more art and fervor than any other writer of his generation. He is concerned with all the major themes, with good and evil, belief and doubt, action and contemplation, the nature of illusion and the joys of the flesh. He is without doubt one of the most important figures in American letters in the twentieth century.
277 pages
ISBN: none
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Isaac Bashevis Singer SHOSHA First USA Edition