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

In the following essay, Whitfield compares Singer's short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” to Yentl, the film adaptation.

In the following essay, Sherman explores the quest for spiritual self-fulfillment in Singer's story “Androygenus.”

In the following essay, Sherman examines Singer's short story “Tseytl un Rikl” in terms of its setting in a Jewish shtetl, the narrative monologue, and the themes of sin and virtue.

In the following essay, Pladott examines the role of the amorous male protagonist as a central figure in Singer's fiction. According to Pladott, these recurring characters underscore man's struggle to reconcile individual desires and universal meaning.

In the following essay, Epstein commends the stories of Singer for helping many American Jews to understand better their cultural history.

In the following essay, Isenberg discusses the progressive themes of catastrophe, ambiguity, and restitution in Satan in Goray. Isenberg concludes that in this novel restitution is not redemptive, as "restitution can only be an ironic impossibility because Singer's subject is the inevitability of living after the tradition."

In the following essay, Howe provides an overview of Singer's literary reputation, artistic influences, and central preoccupations as expressed in his fiction.

In the following essay, Hadda applies the clinical methods of “post-Freudian Self-Psychology” to a reading of Singer's short story “Gimpel the Fool.”

In the following essay, Miron contends that Singer's fiction is not typical of contemporary Yiddish literature, citing the fatalistic passivity and underlying nihilism in his work as the major point of divergence. According to Miron, Singer's characters portray a "human existence that runs from birth without will to a death without choice."

In the following essay, Buchen examines elements of Singer's narrative structure that "meaningfully violate and reconstitute the reader's identity, morality and chronology" to evoke a timeless quality in his fiction. Buchen discusses The Magician of Lublin as a typical example of Singer's all-encompassing vision in which time and space converge on absolute morality.

In the following essay, Boland offers a philological analysis of Singer's short story “Tanhum.”

In the following essay, Bate considers the representation of women in Singer's stories.

In the following essay, Sheridan studies Singer's association of sex in marriage with redemption and his critical views of unrestrained sexuality and perversion.

Isaac [Bashevis Singer] sounds a theme that is fundamental to his views on writing: "A writer must have roots. The deeper a writer's roots, the greater his capacity for achievement…." (p. 30) In the pages of [In My Father's Court] Isaac recounts anecdotes about [his father's beth din, a blend of court of law, synagogue, and house of study], along with other tales about his childhood in Warsaw, with typical economy and a fierce attention to physical detail. Never clu...

In the following essay, Lee examines Singer's use of Biblical metaphors to confront profound existential dilemmas. Drawing comparison to Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, Lee contends that Singer's fiction is "an uneasy meditation between the Biblical image of God who hides his face and the modern image of a cosmos empty of transcendent meaning."

In the following essay, Schanfield compares Singer' short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” to the film adaptation, Yentl, arguing that the element of fantasy in Singer's story is lost in the film's realism.

In the following essay, Schulz discusses Singer's modern sensibility in relation to his portrayal of the social and religious attitudes of Polish Jewry from an earlier era. According to Schulz, this tension between "Old World Judaism" and "New World skepticism," as evident in Singer's fiction, represents a prominent theme in the contemporary Jewish-American novel.

In the following essay, Frieden discusses the significance of supernatural dialogue in Singer's fiction, especially as found in "The Mirror" and "The Last Demon." Frieden notes that Singer "employs monologues in a deliberately archaic framework that disturbs our modern conceptions of literary representation and human existence."

The pursuit of freedom is the central experience of the modern world. Emerging from the Middle Ages, man sought the freedom to shape his own destiny as an individual. Intoxicated with self-sufficiency, he entered the 19th century, but by the time that century was over he had replaced the old authorities and institutions with new ones, becoming as enslaved to the new as he had been to the old. This is essentially the experience to which Singer's work addresses itself. Singer begins by disposing of fre...

In the following essay, Schwarz formulates a definition of the grotesque in literature through a comparison of the short stories of Singer and Sherwood Anderson.

In the following essay, Eppich discusses the elements of the fairy tale form in Singer's short story “The Short Friday.”

Without being a literary theoretician, or ever wishing to, Isaac Bashevis Singer has found himself embroiled in various controversies concerning the aims of fiction. He is, for instance, aesthetically at odds with those fictionists who feel the urge to impart an "important" social, political, or philosophical message in their work. As he has said, "The moment something becomes an '-ism' it is already false." More importantly, perhaps, his commitment to character, pl...

In the following essay, Levin compares the character of Yentl from Singer's short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” to the character of Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler.

In the following essay, Drucker examines "wise fool" characters in "Gimpel the Fool" and Shosha. As Drucker notes, these characters achieve transcendent vision through spiritual openness rather than traditional Jewish religious study based on logical deduction.

Looking over [Singer's] novels in their chronological order (the stories are written in and among, but they belong with the novels) the first apparent thing is the enormous and one might say successful development of his vision. Vision seems to be the right word for what Singer is conveying. The most important fact about him, that determines the basic strategy by which he deals with his subject, is that his imagination is poetic, and tends toward symbolic situations. Cool, analytical qualities are he...

In the following essay, Kaminsky views Singer's short story “Gimpel the Fool” as part of the “schlemiel tradition” in Yiddish literature.

In the following essay, Fraustino draws attention to the influence of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Singer's transcendent vision, particularly as evident in "Gimpel the Fool."

Isaak Bashevis Singer grew up with little of his brother's insurgence and social idealism, and therefore never experienced the latter's bitter disillusionment. More cynical than romantic, and with a firmer grasp of the postwar world of the 1920's, he proceeded surefootedly toward his lifework as a writer by training as a journalist. He made no effort to enter the mainstream of literary fashion, but wrote about what he knew best—the Hasidic aspects of Jewish life. At a time when Y...

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

In the following review of The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, Evanier maintains that the stories of this collection are not as strong as Singer's earlier stories.

Although by the 1920s it had begun to flirt with socialism and even communism, Yiddish literature remained provincial and backward. Singer was at a loss to understand why Yiddish had avoided the great adventures inherent in Jewish history, the false messiahs, the expulsions, forcible conversion, Emancipation and Assimilation. Despite the occasional use of historical settings, Singer is in no sense a historical novelist. What interests him is human nature, and human nature is everlastingly the same. Above al...

Instead of venturing an estimation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's eighth volume of stories, one might just as well reprint some review of an earlier collection and change the names, so nearly identical are his stories in subject, mood and outlook. In Old Love, as in practically every novel and volume of stories since Satan in Goray, Talmudic scholars pore over their tracts by day and surreptitiously open the Zohar and dream of women's breasts at night…. Such mischief is all very provocative...

[In "Shosha"] many Singers appear in one way or another—the journalist, the rabbi's son, the children's writer, the European refugee. (p. 1) There is a nice variety of characters in "Shosha." Singer's method of narration, moving from one small dramatic scene to another, encourages such variety. This method … demands fast-paced plot, simple story line with ingenious reverses and character sketched in broadly. Reading Singer is an easy experience,...

In the following excerpt, Stenberg discusses the ways in which Singer's stories chronicle the dissolution of Eastern European Jewish culture and the Yiddish language in the postwar era.

[Singer's] stories have taken him out of category altogether since the time … when he could still be considered a Yiddish modern primarily concerned with the life of the shtetl. In Passions, as in A Crown of Feathers, postwar and contemporary settings predominate. In these collections, and in Enemies, [a] novel, Singer has marked a period in his work. And though he is careful to maintain, as always, an appeal from his art to the life and experiences of medieval Polish Jewry, Singer's ob...

[The] wide appeal of Singer's stories among readers ignorant of, and indifferent to, Jewish religion, Jewish history, Jewish peoplehood, is a literary fact of the first importance because it disproves the fashionable literary prejudice which holds that writing about Jews is an insuperable obstacle to universal appeal. Critics who have blithely assumed that it is the natural destiny of the human race, or of that part of it which reads books, to puzzle over Blake's Zoas and Yeats' gyres a...

In the following review of The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, Cheyette concludes that Singer's stories continue to hold universal appeal while treating subjects specific to Jewish culture and history.

Singer the novelist has always seemed much less accomplished than Singer the writer of short stories. The novels have been shapeless, even slovenly, and Shosha is no exception. Not the stories, however. These are uncommonly vigorous and carefully fashioned…. [The collection entitled Gimpel the Fool] contains Singer's best work, his boldest and liveliest inventions. And it belies at once his familiar disclaimer that he is only a storyteller. He is not. His tales are thick with speculation and p...

In the following review, French asserts that The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories is “a wonderful collection of stories” by “one of the great tale-tellers of this century.”

Shosha is Isaac Bashevis Singer's most personal novel…. A blurb-writer might say that Shosha "recaptures" the Warsaw of Singer's youth, but the book has no nostalgic softness because it is so consciously a novel about the process of remembering—remembering as the source and perhaps the justification of all literary activity, remembering as the mind's intimation of time stopped or time reversed and thus a token of performance in a violent chaotic universe. The...

About two-thirds of the way through Lost in America, the third volume of what Isaac Bashevis Singer calls his "spiritual memoirs," the writer is living in Brooklyn alternately contemplating suicide and the vision of spectacular success, and has given up writing fiction…. His book begins in Poland where the Holocaust is about to alter or end every life Singer describes, but the writer barely notes the machinations of government, political parties or the ideologues of the time. He dismiss...

[The Spinoza of Market Street] raises a difficult problem in criticism, and I should like to be candid in facing it. Singer is probably the most brilliant, though far from the most characteristic, living writer of Yiddish prose. Devoted as he is to the grotesque, the erotic, the demonic and the quasi-mystical, he is something of a sport in the communal tradition of Yiddish writing. Simply in terms of native talent—by which I mean his capacity for winning our quick and total assent to the bizarre worl...

In the following review of The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, Ritts asserts that the stories of this collection are not as original or as powerful as Singer's previous stories.

[Old Love] unfortunately makes one more conscious of [Singer's] limitations than of his achievement, and in some ways explicitly confirms the judgments … of those critics who have seen a certain falling-off in his recent work…. The weakest stories are first-person narratives in which the narrator is a thinly fictionalized version of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the plots would appear to be thinly fictionalized accounts of the author's travels and tribulations, or of his fantasies, ...

[In The Magician of Lublin, Yasha, reckless adventurer and lover turned penitent] commits himself to [seclusion]; he no longer wants to be on the road (as he did at the beginning of the novel) or, for that matter, to fly above his kind. Although I am not surprised by Yasha's decision—he is, after all, as "obsessive" here as he was about his magic talent—I am disturbed by the ease of his new performance. It is true that his faith wavers in his prison—that he sometime...

["The Slave"] is a tempestuous love-story set against a background that has engaged the imagination of [its] Yiddish author deeply—the aftermath of the Chielnicki Massacres in Poland in 1649. As in his previous novel "Satan in Goray," he seems interested in extracting myth, legend and parable from a mass of actual facts—in composing a story stripped down to almost Biblical simplicity while trying not to violate the contemporary reader's expectations of fictio...

[In "Lost in America" Isaac Bashevis Singer] makes his own rules—choosing to isolate one short span of his life and to revisit it in a form which will demand neither dramatic invention, as in fiction, nor facts not always worth knowing, as in autobiography. "I consider this work no more than fiction set against a background of truth. I would call the whole work: contributions to an autobiography I never intend to write." Even so, this is Mr. Singer's third book of h...

[Singer's] fables and stories, the inspired characters, rabbis, charlatans, whores, so good, so evil, are out of a world that can never be parochial, a world out of our childhood legends, out of medieval romance, out of episodic sagas. They are the stories that were once told to sustain life and community of an evening in any house, any town. But being at least partially literary in origin, Singer's tales are also more sophisticated than we first imagine. It's astonishing how difficult ...

"What can one do? How is one to live?" the narrator of Shosha asks, and though the setting of this novel is Warsaw of the Twenties and Thirties, before the war had given shape to the modern world, the existential dilemmas of philosophy and love behind these questions seem entirely modern. Love is so confusing that Tsutsik, the narrator, conducts affairs with five different women at once, and when he does settle down, it is with Shosha, the moronic and physically stunted sweetheart of his child...

Teibele and Her Demon is no Yentl, the previous dramatization of a fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer. There was far more atmosphere, inventiveness, and tension in that enterprise…. It is not the easiest—or the soundest—thing in the world to turn a short story into a play. This adaptation … keeps some fascination in the shtetl tale….

In the process of bringing [Teibele and Her Demon] to the stage, a number of things have gone wrong. For one, Mr. Singer's marvelous concision has been lost; the play feels overly stretched-out. In a book, moreover, Mr. Singer's dialogue sounds like translated Yiddish, which it is, and that's fine; but he and his collaborator [Eve Friedman] have not securely found an idiom in which to write Teibele for the theatre. There are wonderful Singeresque lines—"She kissed me and b...

When asked how much longer writers could spin love stories before exhausting the time-worn theme and genre altogether, Chekhov replied, "As long as there's 'he said,' and then, 'she said.'" This deceptively simple truth is what continues to fascinate and challenge Isaac Bashevis Singer. To fathom the depths of being between those two pronouns—and, ultimately, their relationship to the divine Him/Her—is at the heart of all Singer's fiction...

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 amb...

Singer is a master storyteller, a weaver of tales and parables revolving primarily around European Jewish society. His characters live in a world of demons, dybbuks, harpies, incantations, ritual ablutions, amulets, yeshivas, mezuzahs, and Shibtahs. Many of them reside in the twentieth century but abide by customs, rituals, and superstitions as old as recorded time. And all of them are affected, in varying degrees, by one of man's basic instincts: lust. [In the stories collected in Old Love], Singer ...

"At the onset of the nineteen-thirties, my disillusionment with myself reached a stage in which I had lost all hope." With these wryly self-mocking words Mr. Singer begins his third volume of memoirs [Lost in America] which takes him from Warsaw to New York by way of Paris, and then on a harrowing (illegal) train trip to Toronto to gain the permanent visa that will prevent his deportation to Nazi-occupied Poland. Many of the features of Mr. Singer's adventures as an up-and-coming writer...

[Isaac Bashevis Singer brings a] quirky vision, a cunning magic all his own, to traditional Jewish experience. He has only to venture out uptown on Broadway to encounter a witch, Jewish on her mother's side at least…. Mr. Singer's prancing Hasidic rabbis, his roistering yeshiva students, are unlike any I have ever known…. If a common thread, beyond rare quality, races through the eighteen stories in Old Love, it is the love of the old and the middle-aged. "Literature,�...

Isaac Bashevis Singer picks up [in "A Young Man in Search of Love"] where his previous memoir, "A Little Boy in Search of God," left off: with the young author in the tenacious arms of his much older lover (and landlady), Gina, and with him trying, through a bit of starvation, to duck the draft. Here again, we are in the world of prewar Yiddish Warsaw, which, we know, is about to be obliterated by history. And we are also, of course, in the exhilarating good company of Mr. Singer...

["Teibele and Her Demon"] is subtitled "A Fable," and I confess that the moment I encounter the word "fable" my heart quails, for in my experience it nearly always means that we are being asked to treat a work more gently and with less critical skepticism than we would normally feel inclined to do…. I found the Singer-Friedman fable highly unsatisfactory…. Like Nabokov, Mr. Singer is a master of literary sleight of hand, and, like Nabokov, he is in jeo...