Books: Sammler's Planetarians

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A FRIEND OF KAFKA AND OTHER STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 31 1 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 66, has now lived in the U.S. longer than he did in Poland. At both terminals he has borne witness to the Jewish catastrophes that dwarf the past and pre-empt the future: pogroms, the Holocaust, assimilation and its concomitant, the dying of the Yiddish language in which he writes. And yet within this spare grandpaterfamilias still resides the spirit of a young Hasid, whose nights were animated by ghosts leaping about the Sabbath candles, inanimate objects given life by the Evil One and the immanent Gd.

In A Friend of Kafka, Singer's fifth book of short stories, he writes of Americans, but they are emigres for whom Hell is a city very much like New York. Physical inhabitants of Mr. Sammler's planet, they are nevertheless very much at home in a Kantian world where space and time obey the appellate court of perception. A woman enters a Manhattan cafeteria and sees Hitler. Later, after her death, she herself is seen, strolling Broadway. A mischievous editor sends an obscure philosopher love letters from a mythical heiress—and the joke blossoms into a great tragedy. A chimney sweep is knocked on the head and becomes uncomfortably omniscient; another knock and he is back to imbecility.

In Singer's view, absurdity, chaos, the irrational, all the fashionable preoccupations of contemporary life, are at best apocrypha, not canon. In a world of prose experiment and cool media, Singer, virtually alone, works in the metaphysical tradition. Behind him are the contiguous works of Kafka, Chekhov —and Gogol, with whom the reader of A Friend of Kafka must agree: "Say what you like, but such things do happen —not often, but they do happen." These 21 miraculous creations are, in the highest artistic tradition, true stories. · Stefan Kanfer