[The] wide appeal of Singer's stories among readers ignorant of, and indifferent to, Jewish religion, Jewish history, Jewish peoplehood, is a literary fact of the first importance because it disproves the fashionable literary prejudice which holds that writing about Jews is an insuperable obstacle to universal appeal. Critics who have blithely assumed that it is the natural destiny of the human race, or of that part of it which reads books, to puzzle over Blake's Zoas and Yeats' gyres and Pound's socio-economic ravings, are invariably brought up short at the prospect of reading books about Jews because, they maintain, the concerns of Jews are not those of universal humanity. (p. 8)

Singer's tremendous success among critics as well as among ordinary readers seems to illustrate the truth of Cynthia Ozick's contention that, contrary to the apostles (to the Jews, anyway) of universalism, great literature never consciously seeks to be...