Throughout his long and prolific career, Isaac Bashevis Singer was a writer of seeming contradictions. He wrote solely in Yiddish, a language whose speakers were almost completely wiped out in World War II, yet had a large international readership in translation. While many of his works were set within the old-fashioned world of the shtetl--the now-extinct Jewish villages and ghettos of Eastern Europe--his mature themes and unflinching portrayal of human faults gave his works a modern sensibility. He was noted for his use of supernatural elements, but nevertheless was a writer "whose most realistic tales are leavened with fantasy and whose fantasies are firmly rooted in the world of fact," as Paul Kresh stated in Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer himself delighted in confounding critics who felt the need to label his work. As the author told Cyrene N. Pondrom in Contemporary Literature: "People always need a name...