“No other living writer has yielded himself so completely and recklessly as has Isaac Bashevis Singer to the claims of the human imagination. Within his limits Singer is a genius. He has total command of his imagined world; he is original in his use both of traditional Jewish materials and in his modernist attitude toward them; he provides a serious if enigmatic moral perspective; and he is a master of Yiddish prose…

“What finally concerns Singer most is the possibilities for life that remain after the exhaustion of human effort, after failure and despair have come and gone. Singer watches his stricken figures from a certain distance…almost as if to say that before such collapse neither judgment nor sympathy matters very much. Yet in all of his fictions the Promethean effort recurs, obsessional, churning with new energy and delusion. In the knowledge that it will, that it must recur, there may also lie hidden a kind of pity, for that too we would expect, and learn to find, in the writer who created Gimpel.”

---from the Introduction by Irving Howe