Although by the 1920s it had begun to flirt with socialism and even communism, Yiddish literature remained provincial and backward. Singer was at a loss to understand why Yiddish had avoided the great adventures inherent in Jewish history, the false messiahs, the expulsions, forcible conversion, Emancipation and Assimilation.

Despite the occasional use of historical settings, Singer is in no sense a historical novelist. What interests him is human nature, and human nature is everlastingly the same. Above all, what unites all his fiction is the perennial struggle between good and evil that rages ceaselessly in the human heart. From Satan in Goray (1955), the first novel he wrote,… to Shosha (1978 …), man serves as the battlefield for this struggle. The good intentions of men and women are disturbed by the devils and passions which upset their stable world. In The Manor (1967) Singer wrote that existence had always meant the same chaos; the ego had always wanted everything for itself: money, fame, sex, knowledge, power, immortality. The traditional Jew had striven to dam the pressing demands of this ego, but the modern Jew had let go. The dominant passions in Singer are not wealth or fame, but all the more sex and, to a lesser extent, knowledge. His major characters seem powerless in resisting the flesh; others aspire to be what no human can hope to be.

Out of the ensuing difficulties and conflicts arise what Singer has called the eternal questions: the wherefores of existence, the inscrutability of God's will, the injustices which keep men interrogating God…. Religious protest and rebellion are constants of Singer's distinct literary landscape. (pp. 197-98)

[Among] the Talmud students and their wives and daughters there are some who are not contented, who doubt God, who are tormented by secret desires. They know what tradition demands; they refuse to act on it or are unable to do so. These are Singer's protagonists. Singer rarely delves into their past to seek out the causes of their behavior; motivation is often a given. The most common problem is the lure of modernity, the breaking away from a safe, proven course, the floundering which results—until his heroes plumb the very depths of despair. Singer remains detached from his characters; he observes them, describes them in every minute detail. Those perhaps closest to gaining his implied approval are the pious characters, integral people remaining true to themselves and to tradition.

Even they suffer, not only for their own shortcomings, but for the havoc they see wrought all about them. Fathers in the family novels watch their children and grandchildren ravaged by fragmentation and breakup. In the more intense novels the protagonists themselves often exemplify fragmentation and floundering. Thus Yasha the magician of Lublin, Broder the escapee from the holocaust in Enemies: A Love Story and Aaron Greidinger in Shosha find themselves trapped in the net of their own obsessive passions of the flesh, symbol of the turmoil and confusion of modernity. Singer's women are as sexually active as the men, but their headlong tumble to disaster is usually aided by their frenzied embrace of some social or political "ism." Desperately these adventurers of the body and soul strive to gain new meaning for their lives in a world from which old meanings have been eliminated. Many die in their futile quest, but … even in their manner of dying Singer's characters seem to be swept away by storms of passion.

Few indeed fare well with the choices before them. Singer's apostates are as lost as his revolutionaries, his assimilationists no better off than frantic Zionists, his hedonists no happier than those engaged in their philosophic searches. The failure of these choices reveals beyond a doubt his fundamental skepticism.

Singer is both a skeptic and a pessimist. He is dubious about human nature which can so quickly succumb to lusts and savagery. He is even more dubious about man's ability to know God or the ultimate secrets of the universe. His characters may crave virtue and selfless faith in God, but they fall prey to sin, lust, greed and doubt, casting serious doubt on Free Will. He is attracted to a past world which never doubted the moral importance of life, but he knows the clock cannot be turned back. Like other modern greats, he sees a world of absurdity in which the good are not rewarded and the bad not punished. God may not be dead, but He is silent, unresponsive to man, who in Singer's world wants a relationship with God perhaps more than with his fellowman.

The prime source of this skepticism is reserved for the political arena, especially radical ameliorationist schemes. Communism is a favorite target…. Singer's essentially apolitical stance leads him to a clearly conservative position. While he regrets poverty and would like to see it removed, it clearly does not represent for him the ultimate evil. Many of his poor and humble characters have enjoyed more inner peace and satisfaction than those in possession of material wealth. What human contentment is attainable can be found on the individual, not the social level, in the moral and spiritual and not the sociopolitical sphere, in man's quest for self-improvement more than in dicta and programs from above and for all. (pp. 198-99)

Another aspect of his conservatism is his implied belief in deracination. The further his characters have removed themselves from the roots that nurtured them, the greater the fall…. [The] degree of insanity increases with the amount of rootlessness. Singer does not advocate rootedness …; he advocates nothing, but the misfortunes befalling his uprooted characters hint at the high cost of deracination….

His language is simple, direct, spare, lean, evocative; his tone that of a storyteller who expects to be understood and who refrains from extensive explanations. His writing has nothing of the synthetic, the artful or the contrived. Whatever his characters do has about it the aura of total authenticity, as though the reader can taste and smell the food of the Sabbath meal, experience the pain of a character's illness or anguish. When Yasha Mazur, after years, reenters a house of worship, the reader partakes of his awe and confusion. Above all, Singer has the rare ability to use objects masterfully as a means of illuminating character, a state of mind, a change of locale, time and place. In Singer's hands they also become effective devices for quickly stepping into a story. (p. 199)

Singer is indisputably a master of the short story…. Similarly, within the novel as genre he is more impressive with the shorter, more intense works than with the sprawling family novels. (pp. 199-200)

Singer's ultimate reputation must rest on his short stories. Here his narrative quickness and philosophic depth show to best advantage, not marred by the structural flaws of some of the novels…. [Perhaps] the best series of stories, nearly perfect and highly distinctive Singer, fill the third volume of collected stories, Short Friday. (p. 200)

[Clearly] Singer's chief failure—and it is a noble one—is the excess of his questions over the answers he is capable of giving. Skepticism, conservatism, humanistic balance, a poetic vision appear to be modest responses to giant questions. But the great theologians have also failed to find meaningful and sustaining answers to the same questions. The fact that Singer could even convincingly raise them in fictional terms is in itself a tribute to his enormous talent. (p. 201)