About two-thirds of the way through Lost in America, the third volume of what Isaac Bashevis Singer calls his "spiritual memoirs," the writer is living in Brooklyn alternately contemplating suicide and the vision of spectacular success, and has given up writing fiction….

His book begins in Poland where the Holocaust is about to alter or end every life Singer describes, but the writer barely notes the machinations of government, political parties or the ideologues of the time. He dismisses Hitler, the Polish fascists, the state of Yiddish and Yiddish literature ("There was no way it could worsen") in a couple of sentences and moves on quickly to what matters most to him: the people in his life; their inability to understand themselves or each other; their innate, often comic helplessness no matter what is going on in the society they inhabit….

Singer's absorption in his own destiny—in...