[Singer's] stories have taken him out of category altogether since the time … when he could still be considered a Yiddish modern primarily concerned with the life of the shtetl. In Passions, as in A Crown of Feathers, postwar and contemporary settings predominate. In these collections, and in Enemies, [a] novel, Singer has marked a period in his work. And though he is careful to maintain, as always, an appeal from his art to the life and experiences of medieval Polish Jewry, Singer's obsession with the memory "of a world that is no more" has shifted into a new key.

Passions seems to deepen the new tendencies he has discovered in his work. He notes the expansion of his subject, which now includes all the Jews of Eastern Europe, "specifically the Yiddish-speaking Jews who perished in Poland and those who emigrated to the U.S.A." But we get...