SINGER'S STORIES ARE FOR EVERYONE

Author: By Christina Robb, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, November 16, 1984
Page: 71
Section: LIVING

But don't think this book won't be right for Christmas, too. The folk elements in these stories come from Singer's own Polish-Jewish past (a couple are more Polish than Jewish); but, like most folk themes, their appeal is universal, and the touch of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist has transformed them into beacons for young minds.

The collection includes all Singer's stories for children, including the stories from his earlier collection "Zlateh the Goat." He's especially pleased with this collection, he tells us in an introduction, because it has no illustrations - leaving a tabula rasa for young imaginations.

Reading them through in order, I felt the stories were arranged more or less by the age of the children to whom they're meant to appeal. The stories in the first two-thirds of the book have that quality of deeply spaced-out (or spaced-in, as I like to insist), vividly celebratory daydream that characterizes all little children's fantasy. If you read the stories as an adult - with or without the excuse of a child to read them to - you will be called back to this feeling from your own childhood. Colors are bright. Alternatives are clear. Plots are simple. Courage flows like water. Energy is everywhere. Every ending is happy.

Many of these stories are set in Chelm, the tiny world capital of the belly-laugh that Singer invented to house the biggest fools imaginable in Polish Jewry. Thanks to Singer's gift for fleshing out solecisms, the Chelm city councilors practice folly raised to an art as they match halfwits to debate how to make sour cream from water or whether there are two identical Chelms.

Most of the rest of the stories are about children, and they work like fairy tales, often peopled with the angels, goblins, devils and dybbuks that crowd Singer's fiction. Sometimes the protagonists find themselves in dire straits - in ancient Babylon, Nazi Warsaw or some 19th-century shtetl - but luck, pluck and the grace of God invariably save them. A surprising number are about love between children, or about children finding the mates they are to marry years later, a quest that preoccupies children long before they've started dating.

With the story "Growing Up," about a boyhood scheme to publish a book, Singer's stories begin to grow up themselves. And the last third of the book pulls no punches at all. As in his adult fiction, Singer uses narrators who have character themselves - an "I," or Aunt Yentl, or an old wanderer hunkering down in a village poorhouse for Chanukah. Some unresolved sadness, some unanswered questions, some first loves left dangling give these stories the ache of contemporaneity.

"Menaseh's Dream," the next-to-last story, hauntingly combines folk vividness and simplicity with adult subtlety and nostalgia. Menaseh, an orphan, gets fed up with his aunt and uncle, who take care of him, and runs away to the woods, where he falls asleep and dreams. His dream is a gateway to heaven, and everyone in his lost family - such a terribly long list for Polish Jews - is a joyful, light-washed sentry and guide. The dream is so beautiful that it's solace even if you haven't lost a world of home. Menaseh awakes to live with new wisdom and a new friend who'll share it, and then, like Singer, he becomes one of "those who know that everything lives and nothing in time is ever lost."

ROBB ;11/14,12:31 NKELLY;11/16,15:38 FRIBUK