[In "Lost in America" Isaac Bashevis Singer] makes his own rules—choosing to isolate one short span of his life and to revisit it in a form which will demand neither dramatic invention, as in fiction, nor facts not always worth knowing, as in autobiography. "I consider this work no more than fiction set against a background of truth. I would call the whole work: contributions to an autobiography I never intend to write."

Even so, this is Mr. Singer's third book of his kind of autobiography, following "A Little Boy in Search of God" and "A Young Man in Search of Love." His father, the author has told us in the earlier books, "lived like a saint and he died like one." And Singer himself is a saint—or anyhow saintly—which may be the reason why, to avoid speaking directly of his virtue, he evolves a...