“The Smuggler,” one of the stories in this collection, is little more than an anecdote, just over seven pages long. An autograph-hunter comes to see Singer in his Broadway apartment. Singer asks why he needs autographs. The man explains: “Some little madness everyone must have. If Jack the Ripper were resurrected from his grave, people would run to get his autograph, especially women.”

It emerges that the man is a failed Yiddish poet:

“How can you know whether a person is a poet or not? If an editor needs to fill a hole in his magazine and he publishes a poem of yours, then you are a poet. If it doesn't happen, then you're just a graphomaniac. I never had any luck with editors and so I belong to the second category.”

Singer asks if he can see the man's poems but he repeatedly refuses. As he leaves Singer asks once more and the man replies with the lines that close the story:

“I thank you very much. What can poetry do? Nothing. There were quite a number of poets among the Nazis. In the day they dragged out children from their cribs and burned them, and at night they wrote poems. Believe me, these two actions don't contradict one another. Absolutely not. Good night.”

These quotations convey a lot of the flavour of these stories. There is Singer's matchless ear for the voices of the different storytellers he meets (this story was translated from the Yiddish by Singer himself). There is the comedy which arises not from contrived situations but out of a specifically Jewish-Yiddish way of talking about and looking at the world. And finally there is the ferocious moral judgment of the societies that Singer describes with such attention, even of the art to which he has devoted his long creative life.

Obviously there is a certain tension between what Singer's characters say and what he himself believes. But there is little reason to doubt that Singer agrees with the smuggler's condemnation of the poetic impulse.

This volume begins with an extraordinary brief author's note about “modern man and his disappointment with his own culture.” Singer recalls how God himself had become disappointed with the corruption of his own masterpiece, man. This corruption was (and Singer cites the Talmud and the Midrash) entirely sexual. The idea inspired the title story, which is set in a world where “Evil had become man's greatest art, his main achievement.”

There is a profound paradox at the heart of these stories. Singer is one of the great tale-tellers of this century. He has a skill for the gripping short narrative, the “yarn,” that is almost without precedent since the time of Kipling. The stories are pared to the bone—most are shorter than ten pages—and the author's eye for the suggestive detail, the item of food, clothing or furniture, is as telling as ever.

There is something unbearably, and increasingly, poignant about Singer's imaginative world. It's as if after the Holocaust wiped out Eastern European Jewry, Singer felt the need to preserve it all in his head. Nabokov felt something of the same impulse when he wrote about pre-revolutionary Russia. But Nabokov was insistent and explicit about what he was doing whereas for Singer it's as natural and unobtrusive as his literary technique. As Irving Howe has said, Singer writes about Jewish life in Cracow and Lublin as if it were still there for us to touch and visit.

Singer is better than anyone else on the surfaces, sounds and smells of life, about worldly things—lust, acquisitiveness, magic, superstition. It is difficult to believe he is the same man who concludes the title story and the book by saying that “flesh and corruption were the same from the very beginning and always will remain the scum of creation, the very opposite of God's wisdom, mercy, and splendor.”

But this paradox proceeds from the courage and humanity of a man who believes only in the transcendent and yet, in his old age, is as firmly rooted as his Methuselah in the dirt and noise of the here and now. Yet he keeps listening and writing, and we must be grateful that he does. This is a wonderful collection of stories.