The reputation of Isaac Bashevis Singer is a recent phenomenon. Until 1955 (the publication date of the translation of Satan in Goray, a novel written twenty years earlier) Singer was virtually unknown to the English reading public. His other novel, The Family Moskat, published in 1945 by Knopf brought him praise from the connoisseurs, but his reputation was still obscure. I doubt very much whether he was better known to Yiddish readers. The name Singer immediately evoked in the mind of the Yiddish reader his more famous brother, I. J. Singer, author of Yoshe Kalb and The Brothers Ashkenazi. Bashevis Singer's reputation rests not so much on Satan in Goray, an interesting though short-breathed work, but rather on the stories, which he has contributed to the Jewish Daily Forward since coming to the United States in 1935. A number of them were translated and finally collected in 1957 under the title Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories. Though he has been advertised as “the last of the great Yiddish masters,” his reputation has been created not by the Jewish Daily Forward, but by the periodicals that have translated him, Partisan Review, Commentary, Midstream. The placing of Singer with the great Yiddish masters is unfortunate. That Singer is a genuinely gifted writer is beyond dispute, but his real affinities, it seems to me, are with writers outside the Yiddish tradition.