About two-thirds of the way through Lost in America, the third volume of what Isaac Bashevis Singer calls his "spiritual memoirs," the writer is living in Brooklyn alternately contemplating suicide and the vision of spectacular success, and has given up writing fiction….

His book begins in Poland where the Holocaust is about to alter or end every life Singer describes, but the writer barely notes the machinations of government, political parties or the ideologues of the time. He dismisses Hitler, the Polish fascists, the state of Yiddish and Yiddish literature ("There was no way it could worsen") in a couple of sentences and moves on quickly to what matters most to him: the people in his life; their inability to understand themselves or each other; their innate, often comic helplessness no matter what is going on in the society they inhabit….

Singer's absorption in his own destiny—in his problems with women, his endless struggle with Providence and the "divine or Satanic forces" that skew his emotions and control his behavior—is so strong that it renders him immune to the terrors of the external world. His account of leaving Europe during Passover of 1935 (by train from Warsaw to Cherbourg, by boat from there to the United States) has a balletic, dreamlike quality, as if the world he is escaping is already dead. As the train rumbles through Nazi Germany, Singer is chewing matzoh; at a time when people are sacrificing all they own for a ticket across the Atlantic, Singer is worried about the possibility of having to share a cabin. Such monumental egotism might be repugnant in other contexts but here it becomes an ingenious survival skill, a stubborn insistence on the right to choose.

It also allows Singer to stop his narrative whenever he feels so inclined and to digress, usually humorously, on whatever suits his fancy. In New York, after the Forward has accepted and is about to print the first installment of his new novel, Singer finds that he can't finish it, and writes a passage that hundreds of writers will undoubtedly clip and tack above their desks: "I had marked down in my notebook three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:

"1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.

"2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.

"3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

"But this novel lacked all three of these prerequisites, especially my urge to write it."…

There are few contemporary writers who have lived as fully as Singer, who wish to share their experiences as candidly, and who can do so with such charm. This is the memoir of a 76-year-old Polish Jew whose life is of exceptional interest since it bridges the fissure between pre-war Eastern Europe and postwar America. It reflects the thinking of a man who has not found Freud or Marx or Herzl or Tolstoy particularly useful, who has chosen to negotiate the baffling business of life without a blueprint of any kind. His writing is magical; his vision refreshingly unsentimental.