While Yiddish lives, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ghost stories may flourish
By PJ Grisar
A tradition largely lost now, lingering in the works of Dickens and an odd line from “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” is the Yuletide ghost story.
In his Nobel lecture, Isaac Bashevis Singer, explaining his penchant for spooky tales — and how those who celebrate Christmas may be at a disadvantage — remarked “nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language.” He of course meant Yiddish. But in the confluence of Christmas and Hanukkah, in the days of the Yiddish New York festival, Singers’ ghosts and his language live on to haunt us.
The triptych of stories — “The Mirror,” “The Last Demon” and the monologue “Kukeriku” — draw from shtetl life and folk superstition.