IN MY FATHER'S COURT

Isaac Bashevis Singer's recollections of No. 10 Korochmalna Street in Warsaw where his father officiated as a rabbi and took on the legal duties of that estate, offers him ample opportunity to give scope to his portrayal of ghetto characters. A shaman at storytelling, Singer writes of the determined sacrifice of an elderly wife for her equally elderly husband which required the bewildered man to divorce her and remarry a young m girl shortly before his death; of Mose Blecher, who wore the look of the Holy Land on his face, and went there, only to return to his old home; the young man with the malevolent wife who came for a dispensation from his marriage only to decide after trudging across the country for one hundred rabbinical signatures to remain in wedded unhappiness; the atheist who blackmailed rabbis for a handout by revealing his wickedness and leaving the community only when remunerated. Singer's own experiences—the, day he saw the Vistula, the trip to Bilgoray to visit his mother's relatives, where he saw a girl with dark eyes and knew that he was ready for "love"—are effortlessly interwoven with the tales of neighbors. Effortlessness is a quality of Singer's writing, as is its endemic richness- and the rightness for its material, and it reads with as much ease as it appears to be written.