Isaac Bashevis Singer's new books, a memoir [A Young Man in Search of Love] and a novel [Shosha], are two more rescue operations in his ongoing literary raid on the vanished world of prewar Poland. Although A Young Man in Search of Love follows the conventions of autobiography, and Shosha, those of fiction, the impulse behind both narratives is to recapture a lost world, to render the rich interior and exterior lives of people responding to unique circumstances. In the foreground of each book, an ambitious young author … encounters a heterogeneous blend of worldly and unworldly Jews. In the background, a heavy German blade hovers overhead. Singer writes from the other side of that fallen Nazi knife; it has been his remarkable achievement to penetrate its steel surface, to capture the uncapturable. (p. 34)

In both life and art, Singer is seeking "tangled situations and genuine dilemmas." His search...