Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Singer, Isaac Bashevis - Morton Ritts (review date 1988)
Singer, Isaac Bashevis - Morton Ritts (review date 1988)
Morton Ritts (review date 1988)
SOURCE: Ritts, Morton. “Musings by a Mystic.” Maclean's 101, no. 32 (1 August 1988): 50.
[In the following review of The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, Ritts asserts that the stories of this collection are not as original or as powerful as Singer's previous stories.]
At 84, Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer is the Methuselah of contemporary literature: someone who offers the wisdom of the ages but who—as his 10th and latest story collection reveals—tends to repeat it too. Yet if most offerings in The Death of Methuselah only echo such powerful earlier collections and novels as Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Manor (1979), half a dozen speak with an enviable authority. The son of a Hasidic rabbi, Singer was born in the Polish town of Radzymin in 1904 and emigrated to the United States 31 years later. His prodigious literary output, which includes...
[The entire page is 505 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
- Introduction
- Principal Works
-
Criticism
- David Evanier (review date 1988)
- Morton Ritts (review date 1988)
- Bryan Cheyette (review date 1988)
- Sean French (review date 1988)
- Lillian Schanfield (essay date 1988)
- Janet Hadda (essay date 1990)
- Margaret M. Boland (essay date 1990)
- Linda Nielson Eppich (essay date 1990)
- Martin Schwarz (essay date 1990)
- Herschel Levine (essay date 1991)
- Joseph Epstein (essay date 1991)
- Peter Stenberg (essay date 1991)
- Joseph Sherman (essay date 1994)
- Joseph Sherman (essay date 1995)
- Grace Farrell (essay date 1996)
- Nancy Berkowitz Bate (essay date 1996)
- Alice R. Kaminsky (essay date 1998)
- Stephen J. Whitfield (essay date 1999)
- Further Reading
- Copyright
