ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
207
o'clock, and Friday is always my crisis day of the week. At first
everything seemed quite smooth and I hoped against hope that this
time I would be spared. But no, the line with the words
'the transcen–
dental unity of the apperception'
was missing. The whole article became
senseless.
"Of course I was angry and cursed all the Yiddish typesetters
with the vilest oaths. After an hour of utter resentment and extreme
anti-Yiddishism, I began a search for the line in the other articles
and news items of our Friday"issue. But this time it seemed to have
been lost altogether. Somehow this was a disappointment to me .
What burned me up more than anything else is that readers, even
my friends in the Writers' Club, complimented me and seemed not
to have noticed the missing line . I've promised myself a million times
not to read
The Haint
on Friday, but you know, there is an element
of masochism in each of us. In my imagination I took revenge on the
typesetters, the editors, the proofreaders by shooting them, beating
them, and making them memorize all my feuilletons since the year
1910.
"After a while, I decided I had suffered enough and began to
read
The Moment,
our rival newspaper, to see what their feuilletonist,
Mr.
Helfman, had written that Friday. Of course I knew beforehand
that his piece Icould not be anything but bad. In all twenty years of
our competition, I've never read anything good by this scribbler. I
don't know how you feel about him, but to me he is an abomination.
"That Friday, his concoction seemed worse than ever, so I gave
up in the middle and began to read the news. I turned to an item
with the title 'A Man
it
Beast,' the story of a janitor who came home
from the tavern at night and raped his daughter. Suddenly the most
impossible, unbelievable, preposterous thing happened - my miss–
ing line was right before my eyes! I knew that it must be an
hallucination. However, hallucinations last no longer than a split
second. Here the words lingered in black type before me:
the
transcendental unity of the apperception .
. . .
I closed my eyes, certain
that when I opened them again the mirage would have vanished, but
when 1did there it was - the unthinkable, the ridiculous, the absurd.
"I admit that even while disbelieving in what you call the super–
natural, 1 often toyed with the idea that one day a phenomenon
might occur which would force me to lose faith in logic and reality.
But that a metal line would fly from the
Haint
composing room at 8
Chlodna Street to the
Moment
composing room at 38 Nelewski-this
I certainly did not expect. My son came into the room, and I must
