by Rebecca Miller I started with one image: a fireman peeing on his front lawn, at the moment between night and dawn, just as the darkness began to drain from the sky. I knew his last name was Senzatimore. I had known a young man with that name—he was, in fact, the assistant editor on my last film—and the grandeur of the name bewitched me. Senzatimore means “without fear” in Italian. It has an aura of the Middle Ages, of our more primitive, real selves, when names could be wishes, or properties of being, and had not devolved to mere accidents of birth. I wanted my man to be a kind of Titan because then his fall—the fall my hunch told me was coming in the story—would be all the more meaningful. And another element came to me as I wrote Leslie Senzatimore peeing on his front lawn: a spirit creature, some mischievous, malevolent entity, which at the time I saw as a soul frozen between lives like a spat-out chunk of bread stuck between two harp strings. I saw him looking down on Leslie, and laughing.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Magician of Lublin, Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review, wrote a short introduction to the FSG reissue for reviewers and booksellers. We've reprinted it here with his permission. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–91) occupies a unique place in American literature. Although he left Poland for the United States in 1935 and lived here until his death, he never wrote a single story in English. He was the only Yiddish writer ever inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the only Yiddish writer ever to receive a Nobel Prize, yet he wrote for the American mainstream. His novels were serialized in Yiddish by the Forward, but—starting with The Magician of Lublin, published fifty years ago—all his books first appeared as English translations. Singer supervised these translations closely, even jealously. (He fired one early translator, Saul Bellow, fearing that Bellow would get the credit for Singer’s own achievement.)