A little boy in search of god

A Little Boy in Search of God, focuses on the relationship between Isaac and his God, whose ways seem unjust, whose world seems to be dominated by cruelty and evil. In the introduction to the book, Singer speaks of himself as a mystic, not a member of a religious group—in other words, as a religious individualist. A mystic will ask hard questions of his God, and from his early childhood Singer has done so. It is appropriate that the first book deals with the search for God, for although other matters are often stressed in the latter two books of this series, there is never a time either in his fiction or in his autobiographical works when Singer is not at least subconsciously concerned with his spiritual quest. Because, as a mystic, Singer defines life in terms of the spiritual rather than the material, these three volumes give far more attention to internal developments than to external events. In A Little Boy in Search of God, for example, he devotes as much space to his discovery of the cabala books in his father’s library as he does to the dislocations and terrors of World War I, as much attention to his visit to a library as to the revolution at the end of the war.