Enemies, A Love Story | Isaac Bashevis Singer | Nobel Prize Winners are few and far between

Enemies, A Love Story | Isaac Bashevis Singer | My first book by Singer and surely not the last......

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Enemies, A Love Story

	Enemies, A Love Story Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Almost before he knows it, Herman Broder, refugee and survivor of World War II, has three wives: Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who hid him from the Nazis; Masha , his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of perpetually impending doom.

Nobel Prize Winners are few and far between

There are reasons that Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and all of these reasons are apparent in ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY.

Though he is not the only Jewish author to have won the Nobel, he is the only author whose primary writing was in Yiddish. Hence, the version of ENEMIES that I read was a translation.

Still, the simplicity of his prose shines through the novel. His storytelling skills are spellbinding.

Mr. Singer perfectly captures the undertone of desperation and doom connected with those who endured the Nazis and survived.

This novel will shock and it will sadden but it never will be less than writing at its finest.

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My first book by Singer and surely not the last......

Isaac Bashevis Singer writes a novel of sheer absurdity and yet, page by page, he makes it very believable.

Herman Broder is a Jew who managed to escape the gas chambers of the Nazi Holocaust by living in a hayloft with his mother's servant Yadwiga from Poland for three years. His wife was not so lucky.....she and her children were all killed by the Nazis......at least that is what we (along with Herman) are led to believe early on. Herman manages to make it to the United States where he marries the peasant girl servant Yadwiga out of sheer gratitude for her saving his life, not out of any kind of a love or fondness for her. And while he is married to Yadwiga, he is carrying on an affair with Masha, who also went through her own camp horrors in Russia. Herman identifies more with her, not to mention the fact that an attraction also exists there, both physically and intellectually.

But just when you think the suspension of disbelief Singer creates cannot get any more bizarre, it does, when Tamara, his ex-wife, shows up in New York, after surviving the Nazis. Herman now has two and sometimes three women after him, and still he is unable to commit to any one of them. Singer creates a novel of absurd proportions, and then has the temerity to keep it growing! And the arrant brilliance in it is that it works on the reader to the very end.

Along the way the characters reveal thoughts which make one think more of a philosophical treatise than of a novel, a mark of a great writer and one of the reasons I could not put this book down:

"How peculiar that a panful of brains should be constantly wondering and not able to arrive at any conclusion! They were all silent: God, the stars, the dead. The creatures who did speak revealed nothing."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, from the book "Enemies, A Love Story"

There are few writers such as Oscar Wilde to whom I can say they are unequivocally brilliant......Singer is certainly one of them.

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Already Gone

How does one cope with such a thing? You know? The Holocaust.

It was the Holocaust that took Herman's parents, wife and two children. He manages to survive by hiding in a hayloft. For three long years, a former servant in his home, Yadwiga, a plain, uneducated but loving Polish woman, keeps him hidden and alive. After the war, we find Yadwiga and Herman married and living in Brooklyn. For other Holocaust survivors, Brooklyn represents opportunity, a sense of re-birth. All around him, new families are being formed out of what is left of old ones. Old customs are being renewed. The old prayers are said. Feasts are held. Traditions prevail. Life goes on. The future is hopeful, but not for Herman. Herman merely exists. He has a job as a ghost-writer for a famous rabbi. Herman is good at writing inspirational messages, messages of hope. But, Herman is not a believer. Not anymore. Not since the Holocaust. To Herman, God is either dead or an enemy. God is out to get him. Herman has a mistress, Masha, a camp survivor. His life is complicated. Then, as it turns out, his first wife who supposedly died in the camps, she's alive. Now Herman has two wives and a mistress. Complicated. They all want a piece of him. Emotionally, he retreats to the hayloft. But, emotionally, Herman is already dead, as dead as he would have been had he been found and sent to the camps, as dead as the rest of them, as dead as his faith in God. In the hayloft, minute by minute, day by dragging day, Herman was exterminated.

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here is my review on this

In New York

The hotel staff

gave me the chair

that

Isaac B Singer

used to

lean his back against

years before he died

custom made

produced

out of gentle wings of butterflies

that circled his first wife's head

every day and night in Treblinka

before she finally

went

up in smoke

So

I went down at the front desk

A weird occurence

of

that strange and powerful thing

I certainly

wanted to bring to their attention

Of course they say

I. B. Singer

never stayed here

never had a first wife

nor she died in the concentration camp

But what's metter?

My back

feels better

way better

ever since

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Everything Jewish

New York after the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. Herman Broder lives a frantic life between 2 wives, and soon to be three. He writes books for a rabbi. His life is a lie, a big lie to which he's grown used. His mind is a mess, just as his life is. The women around him are products of their survival experiences in Europe during the war, as he is too. Religion is present in every page, almost every line, whether it's mentioned with hate or with hope. Things Jewish are ever present: one gets to learn a lot about Jewish customs and terminology.

The story, however chaotic and improbable, almost ridiculous, doesn't fail to be interesting. The author sure knows how to move on between scenes and keep the pace of the changes in Herman's life. The overall impression is of confusion in all areas of live: sentimental, business, psychological, and of course, religious.

These characters behave so weird after their painful experiences, their loss of loved ones, and their witnessing of so much suffering, that they don't believe in anything anymore, not even in why they keep living. Seems they are bewildered and just make most of what they've got at that very moment: which for Herman is most of the time sex. But that is a temporary refuge from insanity, not permanent. People here are lost, drifters melting into the human masses of New York City.

The book is readable, well told, but the story ain't much fun. Herman just annoys me. And the others aren't very likable either. It's a mess of a book that leaves a sweet-sour taste.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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