Singer's "The Spinoza of Market Street" was first published in Esquire magazine in 1961, and later in Singer's 1961 collection of stories written between 1958 and 1961, The Spinoza of Market Street. According to Paul Kresh, this collection "marked another step in Isaac's acceptance as one of the great short-story writers of our time." Irving Malin describes the title story as "clearly one of Singer's best." Although Singer had been living in the United States for over twenty-five years at this point, all of the stories in this collection are set in Jewish communities in Poland. As Kresh states, "the Polish landscape offers plenty of variety and a cast of caricatures as fascinating as any in the Singer gallery." Kresh goes on to claim that, with this collection, "Isaac proved his power to transmute the stuff of provincial folklore and simple faith into works of art of great beauty and...