SOURCE: "The Man Who Talked Back to God: Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904–1991," in The New York Times Book Review, August 11, 1991, p. 11.

In the following essay, Shenker recounts Singer's views on God, contemporary literature, and his own writing.

His mind teemed with eternal questions and with plain-spoken answers. In talk and in writing he was forthright and intense, not a tentative rose water soul given to pallid thought and halfhearted expression. What he conveyed was the burden of experience shaped by trials, transformed by imagination, weighted by reflection, leavened by humor. Part prophet, part scold, writer of genius, ironist, pessimist and cynic, he did not seem to vaunt his superiority but appeared inoffensive and vulnerable. Had there been a contest for the palest, least colorful man on New York's Upper West Side, Isaac Bashevis Singer would have been the odds-on favorite. He looked like a worker in a matzob factory...