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“... At the onset of the 1930s, my disillusionment with myself reached a stage in which I had lost all hope. If truth be told, I had had little of it to lose. Hitler was on the verge of assuming power in Germany. The Polish fascists proclaimed that as far as the Jews were concerned they had the same plans for them as did the Nazis. It was summer and the heat engulfed Warsaw ...”

“... Thank God, none of my fears and premonitions came true. I wasn’t detained on Ellis Island. The Immigration officers didn’t make any trouble for me. My brother Joshua and a fellow writer of his, Zygmunt Salkin, a member of the Anglo-Jewish press in America, came to meet me at the ship. After a few formalities I was seated in Salkin’s car. I wanted to carry my valises but Zygmunt Salkin snatched them out of my hands ...”

“... When Isaac BashevisSinger won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, not everyone was gratified. Clive Sinclair begins The Brothers Singer with a quotation from a BBC radio interview broadcast minutes after the award had been announced: the ‘astounded’ interviewer suspected that ‘some kind of American Mafia’ was at work in the Nobel Committee, while the ‘serious’ Professor Bradbury, discounting this theory, ascribed Singer’s triumph to ‘the domination of American writing in the world today ...”

“... The posthumous English publication of Isaac BashevisSinger’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel, originally serialised in 1957-58 in the New York Yiddish newspaper the Forward; and about the reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime ...”

“... it, laced with cyanide, Leaking from Oswiecim. Bypassing Lublin The name printed on a sign: Isaac BashevisSinger country. Beards Fashioned out of smoke, cloaks bellying over boots. The streets reek prayer, persecution. In Plac Litweski they play chess Under ignored monuments: Unknown Soldier, Union of ...”

“... There is no doubt about the achievement of Isaac BashevisSinger. He is one of the foremost storytellers of our time. His output has been prolific and now, in his 82nd year, comes a collection of a further 22 stories. Gathered from twenty years of magazine publication, translated from the Yiddish sometimes by the author himself, sometimes by or in collaboration with others, they nonetheless have a consistency of tone ...”

“... for a people to write about itself can be both inspiration and good business. It certainly was for Isaac BashevisSinger. His incomparable sense of Polish Jewry, the Yiddishness in which he was brought up, renders itself to the reader as if in the palpable form of experience: the words seem to sit us down and bring us ...”

“... Aliza Shevrin has served her apprenticeship as one of the dutiful translators of Isaac BashevisSinger, along with Ruth Schachner Finkel, Rosanna Gerber, Dorothea Straus et al. She seems no less expert with the Yiddish of an older master, Sholom Aleichem, best-known to English readers as the chronicler of the Jewish poor in the shtetl of the 1880s, the low-life, high-thinking world of Fiddler on the Roof ...”

“... Isaac Singer is a man of far away and long ago. He was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1904. His father was a Hassidic rabbi from a Jewish shtetl in Galicia, a place almost untouched by the Industrial Revolution and sealed off from modern thinking, where from dawn to dusk every activity was elaborately regulated by tribal custom and religious ritual ...”

“... indeed. One wants a collection of tales from her, not a single story that has been overdressed. Isaac BashevisSinger’s Mazel and Schli-mazel also lives well by words alone. There is no feeling that Singer was constrained by his memory of the version of the story he was told by ...”

“... the only one of all these stories that has a strong flavour of another writer. In this case, Isaac BashevisSinger, with whom Paley shares a tradition and an idiom. All the same, all the narrative roles Paley undertakes are those of the same kind of marginal people, with essentially the same exhausted, oblique ...”

“... the reader is left in no doubt that politically, sexually and tonally the narrator is the author. Isaac BashevisSinger’s new novel goes to the opposite extreme and, once the first four words are out of the way (The story begins – when?’), effaces the narrator altogether. The King of the Fields concerns ...”

“... control the more adjectives and adverbs he throws after them. In past years John Updike and Isaac BashevisSinger, among others, have made large claims on Schulz’s behalf. While his imaginative vigour is indeed comparable with that of his great European predecessors, his work lacks their ruthless logic, the ...”

“... to the saintly Lonoff (who Roth persistently refuses to ‘identify’ as Bernard Malamud or Isaac BashevisSinger, the critics’ choices). Zuckerman, too, has scores to settle and finds it impossible to keep his mouth shut. He, too, is possessed by demons and would sometimes quite like to turn into a ...”

“... one more form of commercialism’. The break came when he was assigned to review a collection by Isaac BashevisSinger. The gripping narratives, ‘telling details’ and ‘humanity’ made him yearn for a time before the ‘classy jugglers’ of modernism vandalised the ‘tradition of Tolstoy and Chekhov’. By ...”