[In "Shosha"] many Singers appear in one way or another—the journalist, the rabbi's son, the children's writer, the European refugee. (p. 1)

There is a nice variety of characters in "Shosha." Singer's method of narration, moving from one small dramatic scene to another, encourages such variety. This method … demands fast-paced plot, simple story line with ingenious reverses and character sketched in broadly. Reading Singer is an easy experience, something like reading the bare outline of a Bellow novel, without the latter's intense fleshing out….

Besides amusing character, there is convincing setting, Warsaw, 1930's. The Warsaw scenes are drawn with a knowledge of place and atmosphere lacking in Singer's recent ventures into the American scene, and they hark back to his finer work, as in the memoir "In My Father's Court." Here the hectic street life of the Polish ghetto, with neighborhood interplay of Jewish gangsters and prostitutes mingling...