
The Cafeteria
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $6.20
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Grover Gardner
About this listen
In this mystical short story, the author recalls frequenting a Broadway cafeteria where he would meet other Polish and Russian immigrants. In the fifties, a woman named Esther became part of their group. Although she had been in a Russian prison camp and now had taken a menial job to support her cripple father, she was cheerful and outgoing. She and the author became good friends, but each time he saw her, she looked more disenchanted; her father died, she was often ill, and she worried about her sanity. Several years after their first meeting, she called the author and came to his apartment to tell him that she had seen Hitler, surrounded by Nazis, in the Broadway cafeteria the night it burned down. The author tried to reassure her that she had had a vision, but he was convinced that she was mad. One night he saw her in the subway, looking happy and prosperous, on the arm of an ancient man he had thought was long dead. He was upset by seeing her with the old man, and reappraised her story of seeing Hitler, realizing that if, as Kant argues, time and space are only forms of perception, then she might really have seen Hitler. The next day, he learned that she had killed herself some time before he saw her in the subway. This selection is part of the full-length audiobook, "Dark: Stories of Madness, Murder and the Supernatural."
©2023 Isaac Bashevis Singer (P)2023 Listen & Live Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Spinoza of Market Street
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The Spinoza of Market Street" is yet another masterful short story from literary great Isaac Bashevis Singer. The story is set in Warsaw in the days leading up to World War I. There Dr. Nahum Fischelson lives alone in an attic room overlooking Market Street. From on high he observes the crowd below, showing equal disdain for merchants and thieves alike. Rather than mingle with the people, he devotes his time and energy to explicating the philosophical works of Benedict de Spinoza.
-
-
Remarkable confluence of wonder and love
- By K. Peffley on 03-16-17
-
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These 4 stories are infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads these wise and funny tales in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance. The tales include "Gimpel the Fool," "Esther Kreindel the Second," "The Spinoza of Market Street," and "The Black Wedding."
-
-
Incredible narration
- By Frances on 01-10-19
-
The Black Wedding
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This short story from the collection Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories is infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads this tale in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance.
-
The Magician of Lublin
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Larry Keith
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Magician can dazzle the crowds with his sleight of hand, climb to any height, open any lock. Fearlessly, he does death-defying tricks in theaters all over Poland. At home, his sweet Jewish wife waits for him to return from the city. In the city, his adoring mistresses wait for him to return from home. He holds the key to all hearts, but his own is beset with confusion.
-
-
Complex Masterpiece
- By Evan on 09-11-08
-
The Slave
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: David Chandler, Tracy Sallows
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Singer's famous and never-before-recorded novel about a passionate, forbidden love affair between Jew and Gentile in 17th century Poland.
-
-
Forbidden Love
- By Craig B. Kurtz on 09-24-05
-
Shadows on the Hudson
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 24 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This timeless saga traces the intertwined lives of a group of prosperous Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City after World War II. A chain of events disrupts the close-knit community as each refugee struggles to reconcile the horrific past with the difficult present and explores both the nature of faith and the nature of love. Marriages and affairs fall apart; age and death take their toll; the wisdom of the scripture and kabbalah and the precepts of the great philosophers and avatars of modern science are passionately debated in extended conversations that seethe with drama.
-
-
Very compelling despite the flaws
- By Mark Schlegel on 07-11-23
-
The Spinoza of Market Street
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The Spinoza of Market Street" is yet another masterful short story from literary great Isaac Bashevis Singer. The story is set in Warsaw in the days leading up to World War I. There Dr. Nahum Fischelson lives alone in an attic room overlooking Market Street. From on high he observes the crowd below, showing equal disdain for merchants and thieves alike. Rather than mingle with the people, he devotes his time and energy to explicating the philosophical works of Benedict de Spinoza.
-
-
Remarkable confluence of wonder and love
- By K. Peffley on 03-16-17
-
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These 4 stories are infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads these wise and funny tales in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance. The tales include "Gimpel the Fool," "Esther Kreindel the Second," "The Spinoza of Market Street," and "The Black Wedding."
-
-
Incredible narration
- By Frances on 01-10-19
-
The Black Wedding
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This short story from the collection Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories is infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads this tale in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance.
-
The Magician of Lublin
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Larry Keith
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Magician can dazzle the crowds with his sleight of hand, climb to any height, open any lock. Fearlessly, he does death-defying tricks in theaters all over Poland. At home, his sweet Jewish wife waits for him to return from the city. In the city, his adoring mistresses wait for him to return from home. He holds the key to all hearts, but his own is beset with confusion.
-
-
Complex Masterpiece
- By Evan on 09-11-08
-
The Slave
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: David Chandler, Tracy Sallows
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Singer's famous and never-before-recorded novel about a passionate, forbidden love affair between Jew and Gentile in 17th century Poland.
-
-
Forbidden Love
- By Craig B. Kurtz on 09-24-05
-
Shadows on the Hudson
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 24 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This timeless saga traces the intertwined lives of a group of prosperous Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City after World War II. A chain of events disrupts the close-knit community as each refugee struggles to reconcile the horrific past with the difficult present and explores both the nature of faith and the nature of love. Marriages and affairs fall apart; age and death take their toll; the wisdom of the scripture and kabbalah and the precepts of the great philosophers and avatars of modern science are passionately debated in extended conversations that seethe with drama.
-
-
Very compelling despite the flaws
- By Mark Schlegel on 07-11-23
-
Mr. Sammler's Planet
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mr. Artur Sammler is, above all, a man who has lasted, from the civilized pleasures of English life in the 1920s and 30s through the war and death camps in Poland. Moving now through the chaotic and dangerous streets of New York's Upper West Side, Mr. Sammler is attentive to everything, and appalled by nothing. He brings the same dispassionate curiosity to the activities of a black pickpocket on an uptown bus, the details of his niece Angela's sex life, and his daughter's lunacy as he does to the extraordinary theories of one Dr. V. Govinda Lal on the use we are to make of the moon.
-
-
ASTONISHING
- By madeline grunbaum on 01-25-22
By: Saul Bellow
-
Esther Kreindel the Second
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This short story from the collection Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories is infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads this tale in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance.
-
Fate
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: David Cromer, Marge Kotlisky, Malcolm Rothman, and others
- Length: 23 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A talkative New Yorker corrals a writer at a cocktail party and forces him to listen to the story of her life. A co-production with the National Jewish Theater. Recorded before a live audience at Chicago’s Guest Quarters Suite Hotel in July 1992.
-
Call for the Dead
- George Smiley, Book 1
- By: John Le Carré
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 4 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After an unremarkable interview, Circus agent George Smiley determines the subject of a standard security check—a civil servant in the Foreign Office named Samuel Fennan—poses no threat, nor presents any reason for suspicion of espionage. Hours later, Samuel Fennan is found dead by suicide. Suddenly finding himself under intense scrutiny, Smiley realizes the Circus intends to blame him for Fennan's death. Rather than remain idle, Smiley begins his own investigation into the nature of the man's demise.
-
-
Good, short, intrigue and mystery from the beginnings of the modern era of espionage.
- By Anthro006 on 08-14-24
By: John Le Carré
-
Goodbye, Columbus
- And Five Short Stories
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef, Jonathan Davis, Robert Fass
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.
-
-
A masterpiece
- By marjorie on 10-12-24
By: Philip Roth
-
The Magic Mountain
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 37 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. The year is 1912 and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. But when Castorp arrives he is surprised to find an established community of patients, and little by little, he gets drawn into the closeted life and the individual personalities of the residents.
-
-
A Magical Journey
- By Paul on 08-20-20
By: Thomas Mann