2016-01-04
1 小时 2 分钟Rivka Galchen joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Cafeteria," from a 1968 issue of the magazine.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear Isaac Becheva's singer's story the Cafeteria, which was published in the New Yorker in 1968.
Almost every day on my walk after lunch, I pass the funeral parlor that waits for us and all our ambitions and illusions.
Sometimes I imagine that the funeral parlor is also a kind of cafeteria where one gets a quick eulogy or cottage on the way to eternity.
The story was chosen by Rivka Galchin, who is the author of the novel atmospheric disturbances and the story collection American Innovations.
She's been publishing fiction in the New Yorker since 2008.
Hi, Rivka.
Hi, Deborah.
Now, you were on the podcast in 2010, and at that point you chose a story by Leonard Michaels.
This time you've picked Isaac Bushev as singer.
And I wonder if there is for you any continuity between those two writers.
You know, it's interesting because I myself was reflecting on that because they're both sort of male jewish writers, and I hadn't really done that on purpose, but I was thinking on a deeper level what the continuity might be.
And there is a way in which they're both kind of comic writers.
Ib singer is, in this story in particular, much more punchliney than I think of Leonard Michaels ever being.
But I feel that they both, I call it the Seinfeld Tolstoy continuum, where you can sort of see that in some way, like the joke is a pretty good vessel for history tragedy.
It kind of, in a weird way, can contain it in a certain way.
And I think they're both writers who work along that line and follow, for lack of a better term, a kind of neurotic habit or a quirky worldview or way of being.
And mine it a little bit and show that it has depth and isn't just like a surface quirkiness.