SOURCE: Farrell, Grace. Introduction to Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited by Grace Farrell, pp. 1-26. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996.

In the following essay, Farrell provides an overview of critical responses to Singer's stories.

His was a voice unique in American letters. Isaac Bashevis Singer—Jewish émigré from Poland, Yiddish-speaking Hasid—captivated an American and then a world readership with fiction that seemed both exotic, in its evocation of Eastern European shtetl life, and familiar, in its poignant depiction of loss and recovery, exile and redemption. Never easily placed within any tradition, always an outsider, Singer was doubly distanced from his American readers, who knew him only through translation, and from his Yiddish readers, who found their shtetl milieu transformed by both a modernist sensibility and an archaic, folkloric imagination.

Born near Warsaw on 21 November 1904, into a pious Hasidic household—which he would imaginatively portray...