[Isaac Bashevis Singer brings a] quirky vision, a cunning magic all his own, to traditional Jewish experience. He has only to venture out uptown on Broadway to encounter a witch, Jewish on her mother's side at least…. Mr. Singer's prancing Hasidic rabbis, his roistering yeshiva students, are unlike any I have ever known….

If a common thread, beyond rare quality, races through the eighteen stories in Old Love, it is the love of the old and the middle-aged. "Literature," Mr. Singer writes in an author's note, "has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience."

Grotesque loving, for the most part….

Not counting his many delightful tales for children, [Old Love] is Isaac Bashevis Singer's eighteenth book, his first collection of stories...