SOURCE: Ritts, Morton. “Musings by a Mystic.” Maclean's 101, no. 32 (1 August 1988): 50.

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.

At 84, Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer is the Methuselah of contemporary literature: someone who offers the wisdom of the ages but who—as his 10th and latest story collection reveals—tends to repeat it too. Yet if most offerings in The Death of Methuselah only echo such powerful earlier collections and novels as Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Manor (1979), half a dozen speak with an enviable authority. The son of a Hasidic rabbi, Singer was born in the Polish town of Radzymin in 1904 and emigrated to the United States 31 years later. His prodigious literary output, which includes essays, plays and children's books, has always demonstrated a...