Shosha is Isaac Bashevis Singer's most personal novel….

A blurb-writer might say that Shosha "recaptures" the Warsaw of Singer's youth, but the book has no nostalgic softness because it is so consciously a novel about the process of remembering—remembering as the source and perhaps the justification of all literary activity, remembering as the mind's intimation of time stopped or time reversed and thus a token of performance in a violent chaotic universe. The cast of significant characters is limited, but in many scenes … Singer conveys a sense of the teeming particularities of Polish-Jewish life reminiscent of the best things in his two compendious family chronicles, The Manor and The Family Moskat.

The pursuit of the past is translated into a central principle of plot in Greidinger's relationship with Shosha. She was his intimate childhood friend in the poor and pious Jewish neighborhood of Krochmalna Street, and when he rediscovers her as an adult, still a slip of a girl, scarcely full-grown, retarded in mind as well as in body, she seems to him the embodiment of arrested, or perhaps perpetuated, childhood….

Now, all of this verges on allegory, and that is a basic problem of the novel. Shosha's very name fits into the design: it suggests the Hebrew word for rose,… the rose that does not wither, that is beyond the ravages of time. To possess this fragile flower, Greidinger is prepared to sever his social connections with the world of Yiddish writers, to neglect his material well-being, even to sacrifice his life…. To be sure, the eternally innocent Shosha has her poignant moments in the novel, but she strikes this reader at any rate as too vague, too much a mere idea, and the overwhelming attraction she holds for the intellectual Greidinger is no more than intermittently credible. In order to create a plausible relationship between two such disparate figures, a novelist would have to have the psychological genius of a Dostoevski or the insight into the metamorphic power of imagination of a Nabokov. Singer's own gifts lie elsewhere—in the evocation of cultural character-types and settings, in the embodiment of metaphysical speculation in the destinies of fictional personages.

And yet, Singer, here as elsewhere, is so beguiling a writer that one readily forgives the flaws of his work. The sketchiness in the psychological definition of character is abundantly compensated for by the writer's ability repeatedly to dramatize, in the full concreteness of the fictional moment, the movements of the contemplative mind as it ponders man's imponderable place in the infinite scheme of things. In this regard, Shosha at its best recalls one of Singer's finest stories, "The Spinoza of Market Street." (p. 20)

Metaphysical speculation, anchored in … individual character and situation, retains something of its intrinsic intellectual breadth but is both enlivened and ironically qualified by a wry sense of the discrepancies between systems, concepts, logical reasoning, on the one hand, and the stubborn particularities of existence, on the other. As a writer of metaphysical fiction, Singer is thus the exact obverse of J. L. Borges. Borges creates ficciones that are ingenious parables devised to unsettle conventional notions of time, space, extension, causation, identity. Singer, faithful to the Yiddish literary tradition from which he derives, adheres mimetically to the gritty surfaces of a closely observed world but surrounds that world with vertiginous mental prospects against which human lives and their impedimenta waver, wobble, vanish, only to reappear with an assertive irreducibility. (p. 21)

Singer may have made a tactical error in introducing Shosha as one symbolic "answer" to the quandary of human transience, but in other ways the novel succeeds in plangently rendering the process of questioning the place of man in the frightful flux of being, and that is what gives conviction to this literary pursuit of a vanished past. (p. 22)