"Yeah, yeah," the gentile said. "A bad dream will bring life to an end." - Kadia Molodovsky

I wrote the stories included in this book in the last fifteen years. From a world that vanished most dreadfully, and that lives on in our memories, images of piety, virtue, and Jewish morals awaken. There people stood with feet on poor soil, but with their souls in a higher world of good works and good deeds. These very images live in me, and they emerge in a large number of the stories in this book. A Jew was never concerned with the appearance of the walls of his house. He would never call an interior decorator when he needed to whitewash these walls for Passover. He merely hung a picture of the Vilna Gaon on the wall, and that was embellishment enough. He wasn't concerned about what kind of bookcases he had, as long as they contained the Talmud. It didn't matter to him if the windows of his house weren't in the latest style, because he still knew where the eastern wall was. When he gave to charity, he certainly didn't look in the newspapers to see if his name was there, and if the letters were big enough. In our time, people have moved from an inner, spiritual world to a life of externals, to things that flaunt themselves in one's face, that have more glitter than warmth, more talk than thought; more outward show than introspection. And as a Jew advanced from an inner to an outer station, as usual, in that advance, he lost those possessions he had, and had to go back, look for, and find them. These losses and gains are both tragic and comic. A good number of the stories in the book are dedicated to this significant phenomenon in our lives. Perhaps that was why I wanted to call the book A House with Seven Windows: light and shadows enter into each window.

If Mr. Kasher could have gotten rid of just one word in the English language, he would have banished the word funny. (first lines of "In a Living Room" 1947 story)

One rich man is drawn to another.