A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories

The title story follows Akhsa, orphaned young and raised between two grandmothers' irreconcilable convictions, one a devout village matriarch, the other a Prague-educated mystic sympathetic to the heretical Frankist movement. Akhsa converts to Christianity, survives an abusive marriage, and returns to Judaism only in old age, and on her deathbed finds a crown-shaped knot of feathers hidden inside her pillow, bearing a faint Hebrew inscription that seems, depending how it's read, to promise salvation or deny it. Singer refuses to adjudicate which reading is correct.

'The Cafeteria' relocates that same refusal to postwar Manhattan, where the narrator, a writer much like Singer himself, listens to a fellow refugee named Esther insist she has seen Hitler eating quietly at a nearby table decades after the war supposedly ended him. The cafeteria itself later burns down, and Singer leaves open whether Esther's vision was delusion, ghost story, or a plain statement that the century's worst evil never actually finished happening.

'Old Love' turns the same refusal toward romance instead of politics: Harry Bendiner, a retired widower in a Florida high-rise, falls for a young neighbor half his age, and Singer declines to say whether the attraction redeems what's left of Harry's life or simply repeats an old man's oldest mistake, the ambiguity being the one constant this book allows itself from story to story.

Akhsa's entire life plays out the argument her grandmothers never resolved between them, orthodox obedience against mystical improvisation, and Singer structures her conversions and reversions as that argument continuing to run inside her long after both women are gone, with Akhsa serving as the battlefield rather than a participant who ever gets to choose a side outright.

Singer sets Esther's sighting in the most banal possible setting, a cafeteria full of elderly refugees eating alone, which makes her claim land less as horror-story spectacle than as a plain description of what survivors carry into ordinary rooms for the rest of their lives, whether or not anyone else in the room can see it too.