SOURCE: "The World Is One Vast Madhouse," in The New York Times Book Review, April 10, 1994, p. 9.

In the following review, Conarroe praises the posthumous publication of Meshugah.

One would have to be meshugah (that is, cuckoo, crazy) not to celebrate the publication of this brief tragicomic novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who died in 1991. Originally written in Yiddish, Singer's group portrait of Holocaust survivors in Manhattan first appeared in serial form in The Forward during the early 1980's, when the author himself was nearly 80. He changed its original title, "Lost Souls," to Meshugah after he and Nili Wachtel translated the work into English. Both titles are brilliantly appropriate.

Recognizing that it is usually irresponsible to identify novelists with their characters, we can nevertheless assume that Singer's narrator is partly modeled on his own younger self. Aaron Greidinger is a Polish exile in his late 40's who gives radio...