[The Spinoza of Market Street] raises a difficult problem in criticism, and I should like to be candid in facing it. Singer is probably the most brilliant, though far from the most characteristic, living writer of Yiddish prose. Devoted as he is to the grotesque, the erotic, the demonic and the quasi-mystical, he is something of a sport in the communal tradition of Yiddish writing. Simply in terms of native talent—by which I mean his capacity for winning our quick and total assent to the bizarre world of his fictions—there cannot be a dozen living writers in any language as fortunate as he. Yet after reading his work over the past seven or eight years in both Yiddish and English translation, I find myself uneasy. I remain under his spell, admire his virtuosity, respond to his cast of imps and devils, but fail to see any principle of growth in his work. Singer seems almost perfect within his stringent limits, but it is a perfection of stasis: he plays the same tune over and over again, and with a self-confidence that is awesome he keeps modelling his work largely on … his own work. (pp. 19, 22)

The title story of [The Spinoza of Market Street turns] upon ordinary life—that of a rationalist Jewish scholar in war-time Poland who, after decades of barren philosophizing, finds a taste of paradise by marrying an old crone. But Singer's treatment, while it begins with realism, keeps steadily edging away from it. The power of this fine story depends, almost as much as in his direct engagements with the grotesque, upon his taste for strangeness and his gift for yoking together a number of discordant tones: the mundane and exalted, the lyrical and perverse, the transcendent and demonic.

Within his narrow 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 his modernist attitude toward them; he provides a serious if enigmatic moral perspective; and he writes Yiddish prose with a rhythmic and verbal brilliance that, to my knowledge, can hardly be matched….

Yet, Singer seems to be mired in his own originality. There are times, as in some of the lesser stories in The Spinoza of Market Street, when he displays a weakness for self-imitation that is disconcerting. Second-rate writers imitate others, first-rate writers themselves, and it is not always clear which is the more dangerous.

Still, can one regard the absence of "development" as a legitimate critical judgment? Is the criterion of "growth" one that can be properly applied to a writer who has mastered his chosen form and keeps producing work often distinguished and always worthy of attention? For if Singer moves along predictable lines, they are clearly his own, and no one can accomplish his kind of story nearly so well as he. (p. 22)