One Story closes 2022 with a never before translated into English story by the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Originally published in the Yiddish daily The Forverts on May 27, 1956, it is a somewhat unusual story for him.

Joe McCloskey is an old curmudgeon in his seventies - his ex-business partner pushed him out of his business and noone cares about him so he in turn stopped believing in anything. In the first pages of the story Isaac Bashevis Singer builds a picture of New York to match Joe - lawless and almost hopeless. Until the day of a moon eclipse when he looks up at the sky for the first time in years and realizes that while New York had been changing, nature had not and that sends him on reevaluating his own ideas of the world and his place in it.

Even though the story is not set at Christmas (neither it was published then), it reads like a Christmas story which makes its choice for that specific issue of the magazine especially apt. It is not a holiday miracle but a nature one (or so it seems if you do not understand how the eclipses happen) that makes Joe think back on his life and his own fault in what happened at him. And the last sentence closes the story perfectly and is a perfect counterpart to the start of the story. It is a short story (~4K words on a rough count) and it reminded me of an O'Henry story in a lot of ways (albeit a little grittier at the start).

As usual, the story is paired with an interview (this time with the translator as the author is not available) and some notes by the editor online. Sometimes I wish these were printed in the booklet so I can store them together but I understand why online makes more sense to the publisher (and as they are free, they can serve as advertisement). The interview, notes and an excerpt from the story can be read here: https://one-story.com/product/the-eclipse/ ( )