SOURCE: Cheyette, Bryan. “Mistakes Made and Mended.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4464 (21 October 1988): 1180.

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.

Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel The Penitent (1984) was an uncharacteristic tirade against modernity. Since its publication in Yiddish in 1974, Singer has been assiduously rewriting his act of betrayal as a young man in Warsaw in the 1920s, a betrayal which culminated in his departure from the devout Yeshiva world of his Polish-Jewish parents—subsequently destroyed in the Holocaust—for the sacrilegious world of his incorrigible imagination which, since the 1930s, has found a congenial home in America. The Penitent, as its title suggests, is about a modern-day figure who returns to the rabbinical values of Singer's parents. In an epilogue to this work, Singer has pointedly...