Volume 25, Number 19 · December 7, 1978
The Revenge of I. B. Singer
By Leon Wieseltier
Shosha
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pp., $8.95
Gimpel the Fool
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 205 pp., $4.95 (paper)
A Young Man in Search of Love
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Doubleday, 192 pp., $12.95
'I must only imagine a door, a good old door, like the one in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron handle and a bolt. There is no walled-in room that could not be opened by such a door, provided one were strong enough to suggest that such a door exists.' These words evoke the stifled, timorous, obituary spirit of Isaac Bashevis Singer's new novel, Shosha. The words are not Singer's, however; they were written by Bruno Schulz, a writer he admires, in the doomed town of Drogobych, Poland, in 1937. By that time Singer, who, unlike Schulz, 'did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust,' was safe in Manhattan, trying to recapture in fiction the universe he had escaped. Shosha is another among these mordant retrievals.
Review, 1972 words
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