The Last Demon - Isaac Bashevis Singer [0]
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
Born 21 November 1904, Leoncin, near Warsaw, Russian Empire
Died 24 July 1991, Surfside, Florida
‘The Last Demon’ and ‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’ first published in book form in Short Friday and Other Stories (1964). ‘The Cafeteria’ first published in book form in A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (1970).
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
The Last Demon
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Selected from The Collected Stories, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1996
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2011
‘The Last Demon’ translated by Martha Glicklich and Cecil Hemley
‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’ translated by Marion Magid and Elizabeth Pollet
‘The Cafeteria’ translated by the author and Dorothea Straus
Copyright renewed © Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1981, 1982
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-197063-9
Contents
The Last Demon
Yentl the Yeshiva Boy
The Cafeteria
The Last Demon
I
I, a demon, bear witness that there are no more demons left. Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced? I am the last of the persuaders. I board in an attic in Tishevitz and draw my sustenance from a Yiddish storybook, a leftover from the days before the great catastrophe. The stories in the book are pablum and duck milk, but the Hebrew letters have a weight of their own. I don’t have to tell you that I am a Jew. What else, a Gentile? I’ve heard that there are Gentile demons, but I don’t know any, nor do I wish to know them. Jacob and Esau don’t become in-laws.
I came here from Lublin. Tishevitz is a godforsaken village; Adam didn’t even stop to pee there. It’s so small that a wagon goes through town and the horse is in the marketplace just as the rear wheels reach the toll gate. There is mud in Tishevitz from Sukkoth until Tishe b’Av. The goats of the town don’t need to lift their beards to chew at the thatched roofs of the cottages. Hens roost in the middle of the streets. Birds build nests in the women’s bonnets. In the tailor’s synagogue a billy goat is the tenth in the quorum.
Don’t ask me how I managed to get to this smallest letter in the smallest of all prayer books. But when Asmodeus bids you go, you go. After Lublin the road is familiar as far as Zamosc. From there on you are on your own. I was told to look for an iron weathercock with a crow perched upon its comb on the roof of the study house. Once upon a time the cock turned in the wind, but for years now it hasn’t moved, not even in thunder and lightning. In Tishevitz, even iron