SOURCE: "Isaac Bashevis Singer, Radical Sophistication, and the Jewish-American Novel," in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 3, 1968, pp. 60-6.

In the following essay, Schulz discusses Singer's modern sensibility in relation to his portrayal of the social and religious attitudes of Polish Jewry from an earlier era. According to Schulz, this tension between "Old World Judaism" and "New World skepticism," as evident in Singer's fiction, represents a prominent theme in the contemporary Jewish-American novel.

I wish in this paper to offer a generalization about the current Jewish-American novel, using as my major illustration the admittedly special case of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The arbitrariness of this procedure, since Singer would appear to occupy a peripheral position in relation to the American novel, will, I hope, become less objectionable as I go along. Because he is imbued with Old-World Jewish habits of thought more thoroughly than his American counterparts, while continuing undeniably also...