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. 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. And the last third of the book pulls no punches at all.