Saul Bellow, an early translator of Isaac Bashevis Singer, has written of the short story in general that it “should be interesting, highly interesting, as interesting as possible—inexplicably absorbing.” By this measure, Singer always comes through for the reader. But Bellow also wrote: “For there is power in a story. It testifies to the worth, the significance of an individual. For a short while all the strength and all the radiance of the world are brought to bear upon a few human figures.” By these higher criteria, I am less sure.

That is not to suggest The Death of Methuselah is a disappointing collection. Although Singer does not here attain the heights he scaled three decades ago in Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, he remains one of our best short form writers (along with Stanley Elkin and Stephen Dixon). He breaks many rules of the canon: He doesn't concoct scenes, doesn't create characters in depth, but rather tells us what went on. It's one person narrating to another.

Like a conjurer, though, Singer instantly breathes life into his people. He makes them real and urgent. We are drawn irresistibly into their lives and turn the pages with eagerness.

Singer's map of the world shows a terrain marked by chaos, jealousy, treachery, infidelity, betrayal, pathos, idiosyncrasy, and perversion—“the eternal laws of human conduct,” by his lights. “Nothing can be explained,” one of his characters says. His stories are deeply sad and cynical, yet they are steeped in humor and charm.

Take “Sabbath in Gehenna.” On that special day the fires do not burn, “the beds of nails are covered with sheets.” A meeting is held by “the free thinkers (there are many of them in Gehenna). … As is usually the case with enlightened ones, their topic is how to improve their lot, how to make a better Gehenna. …”

Comrade Yankel proposes that they form a “united front.” He has a number of demands in mind: “First, that the week in Gehenna should not last six days, but that we should have a four day week.” Others include six-week vacations with sex and free love. But the Sabbath ends: “The fires leaped up again. The nails on the beds began to glow with heat. The punishing demons grabbed up their rods, and a lashing and a whipping and a hanging and a wailing erupted once more.” Social do-gooders in this collection get their comeuppance; only observant Jews and Zionists (narrowly) escape Singer's wrath.

A more serious treatment of political themes, “Runners to Nowhere,” still interlaces humor with human suffering and tragedy. Singer paints a macabre picture of Polish Jews hurrying on foot along a road, burdened with trunks and briefcases full of manuscripts, clothes and food. They are fleeing from Nazi to Communist territory. One of them is Feitl, a frail Yiddish writer. Unable to carry his load, he “stopped and began to choose those plays he thought were his best and threw the others away.”

Another writer among the refugees is Bentze, a physical dynamo who has “a pair of huge paws.” A Trotskyite, he “switches over with shameless vulgarity” to Stalinism now. After his apostasy Bentze offers cigarettes only to his new comrades on the road, proclaiming loudly that he has none to spare for “Trotskyite traitors to the masses, lackeys of Rockefeller and Hearst, agents of the Fascists.” The Stalinists are happy to accept him as one of their own.

Underscoring this political betrayal is Bentze's deeper treachery in taking Feitl's wife away from him. Broken by his loss, Feitl manages to reach Bialystok. There the Stalinists, who have organized their own NKVD, put him on trial. They begin their inquisition:

“Someone had written a poem about spring and this critic managed to find in such innocent words as ‘flowers’ and ‘butterflies’ allusions to Mussolini, Leon Blum, Trotsky, and Norman Thomas. The birds were not just simple birds but the bands of Denikin and Makhno. The flowers were nothing but symbols for the counterrevolutionists Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had already been purged.”

In 1941 the Nazis arrive at Bialystok and the Stalinists run. Bentze makes it to the Soviet Union. When he “threw himself on the ground to kiss the earth of the Socialist land, a Red Army man clutched him by his collar and arrested him. He was sent somewhere to the north to a place where the strongest man could not last longer than one year.”

Singer's details have the power instantly to evoke a character, a life or an epoch. He describes a retired man in Florida: “Without clothes, Israel Danziger wasn't Israel Danziger at all; he was just a little man, a bundle of skin and bones, with a single tuft of hair on his chest, protruding ribs, knobby knees, and arms like sticks.” In a small town in Austria, “It was rumored that those who baked the bread kneaded the dough with their bare feet.” A radiator in a Manhattan apartment “was seething quietly, and sang out a tune which reminded me of our tiled stove on Krochmalna Street and the kerosene lamp over my father's desk.” Poland is always in the author's memory; it is undoubtedly because he has stayed so close to his roots that his work continues to have a vivid authenticity and strength.

In one story Singer writes of a married couple in late middle age: “On the surface it appeared simple enough, but behind their mutual affection hovered a kind of enmity. They could neither stay together nor remain apart. Eventually they were able to get along only in the dark.” Yet the man is shattered by the unexpected death of his wife: “He'd forgotten that one could lose absolutely. He hadn't reckoned with the kind of power that in one second erases everything petty and ambitious.” Such lines are the outgrowth of a life's experience and work; they are the distillation of maturity and exact observation.

My favorite stories here include two that are almost unutterably sad. In “The Smuggler,” a little toothless man wearing a knitted cap appears at Singer's door with a cart of Singer's books to be autographed. The visitor, who has escaped the Holocaust, defines himself as a smuggler. “My body is my contraband,” he says, and he has smuggled it through life “between the powers of wickedness and madness.”

In “The Trap,” a woman enters a loveless marriage with a man who barely speaks to her. He acts like a hermit, and is constantly absorbed in computing his earnings. When he warmly invites a nephew to live with them, she perceives it as a welcome change. She is piteously mistaken: Her husband has only set out to destroy their marriage.

Now in his 80s, Singer continues to write with zest and fresness. He keeps us guessing, as he intends to. In Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer Richard Burgin asked him what his “rules” were for composing a short story. Singer replied in part: “It must be short. … Of course, it should have suspense from beginning to end. … A story to me must have some surprise. The plot should be such that when you read the first page, you don't know what the second will be. When you read the second page, you don't know what the third will be, because this is how life is, full of little surprises. … And the third condition is the most important. I must be convinced, or at least have the illusion, that I am the only one who could write this story or this particular novel. …”

In The Death of Methusaleh, each tale flares to life. The flare is small, and usually it is not (as in Singer's early stories and novels) the sustaining flame of great art. The compression and concision he achieves give these pieces more the character of parables. If they are not always deep, though, they are invariably instructive. They are also mesmerizing.