SOURCE: "Isaac Bashevis Singer: Mediating Between the Biblical and the Modern," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, Fall, 1985, pp. 117-23.

In the following essay, Lee examines Singer's use of Biblical metaphors to confront profound existential dilemmas. Drawing comparison to Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, Lee contends that Singer's fiction is "an uneasy meditation between the Biblical image of God who hides his face and the modern image of a cosmos empty of transcendent meaning."

Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "Old Love" concludes as Harry Bendiner, eighty-two year old millionaire, survivor of three wives and two children, dreams of meditating in a solitary British Columbian tent with the daughter of a dead love on why a man is born and why he must die. In one way or another each of Singer's stories is a variation on this essential meditation, and the exiled meditant is the prototypical Singer...