Isaak Bashevis Singer grew up with little of his brother's insurgence and social idealism, and therefore never experienced the latter's bitter disillusionment. More cynical than romantic, and with a firmer grasp of the postwar world of the 1920's, he proceeded surefootedly toward his lifework as a writer by training as a journalist. He made no effort to enter the mainstream of literary fashion, but wrote about what he knew best—the Hasidic aspects of Jewish life. At a time when Yiddish literature had reached maturity and was concerned with the grievous events of the day rather than the pious medievalism of the past, young Singer devoted his first major work [Satan in Goray (1935)] to the spectacular and psychotic aspects of 17th-century Jewish life—and not as certain other writers, with a view to extolling the faith in survival but, on the contrary, to expose and satirize the psychopathic...