Shosha is Isaac Bashevis Singer's most personal novel….

A blurb-writer might say that Shosha "recaptures" the Warsaw of Singer's youth, but the book has no nostalgic softness because it is so consciously a novel about the process of remembering—remembering as the source and perhaps the justification of all literary activity, remembering as the mind's intimation of time stopped or time reversed and thus a token of performance in a violent chaotic universe. The cast of significant characters is limited, but in many scenes … Singer conveys a sense of the teeming particularities of Polish-Jewish life reminiscent of the best things in his two compendious family chronicles, The Manor and The Family Moskat.

The pursuit of the past is translated into a central principle of plot in Greidinger's relationship with Shosha. She was his intimate childhood friend in the poor and pious Jewish neighborhood of Krochmalna Street, and when...