Cynthia Ozick wrote in "The New York Times" in 1973, "For a small mountain of reasons, this book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years." Referring to the novel's eponymous main character, Melvin Maddocks wrote in "Time", "It is one of the most venerable axioms of writing—certainly as old as "Moll Flanders" (1722)—that novels should be about sinners. Saints are difficult enough to deal with in real life, let alone in fiction. [...] Yet has taken on a saint and a fable in fiction, and won—apparently by sheer moral passion." The novel deals with Jewish life in the United States before the Second World War as well as the ramifications of the Holocaust.