Shadows on the Hudson, Vol. 4 | Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Sherman

Shadows on the Hudson, Vol. 4 | Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Sherman | a brilliant novel but no fun to read

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Shadows on the Hud...

	Shadows on the Hudson, Vol. 4 Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Sherman Audio Literature, 1998 average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Shadows on the Hudson in set in New York City in the late 1940s and details the intertwined lives of a circle of prosperous Jewish refugees. From gloomy Upper West Side apartments to the pastel Yiddish resorts of Miami, Singer covers the territory of American Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust in this impressively expansive novel.

Nowhere plans for nobody

"Shadows on the Hudson" is an excellent novel, even better than Singer's similiar but more compact "Enemies, a Love Story". Few writers have ever been able to involve the reader in the inner lives of fictional characters the way Singer could, and fewer still would have been able to make their stories so fascinating when they're all so cynical and often downtrodden, bemoaning God's silence and the corruption of modern man. Singer had a singular talent for exploring the chasm between expectations and reality, how we're almost always let down (and the post-WW2 Jews moreso than practically anyone in history), and how, for some totally inexplicable reason, we keep going. He made the absurd palpable for the modern reader, far better than even Camus and Sartre did, because he was an entertaining storyteller first, and THEN he was a philosopher.

This long, convoluted story of the lives of a half-dozen Jewish intellectuals and businesspeople in New York immediately after the second world war must be Singer's masterpiece. He often explored the same ideas in his novels---the point of existence and the role of the Jew in modern society---and in fact he often used philandering husbands and bitter wives and mistresses as primary characters, but he pulled it all together here into a riveting, beautiful story of obsession, regret, pain, and penitence that you simply don't want to end. That these people, and their endless torturous questions, aren't really important in the long run is precisely the final point of Singer's big novel: we make a tiny, swift ripple in the river and then we're gone, possibly forever; but it is how we grapple with the desires of the body and the needs of the mind and heart that gives our lives substance and form. Without this questioning and searching, without this rending of our spirit by apparently random or viscious events in our lives...without all of it, we would never turn to God. And then our small lives ARE meaningless.

At least, that's what I think Singer is trying to say. In the end, he was a fantastic writer who drew you into the story and kept you guessing until the end. Just like life itself...

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a brilliant novel but no fun to read

Had it been published in English when it was written, shortly after WWII, it would have been ignored as the story of a mere milieu. Today it is the story of Everyman. These Jewish refugees in New York after the Holocaust, relatively prosperous since the truly poor had no means of escaping Hitler, display all the Angst, ambivalence, rootlessness and indecision of modern mankind. They cannot decide between reason and faith, modernity and tradition, America and Europe. Their God is no comfort and his non-existence no release. All that is real is Hitler -- and Hitler stands for what the modern world has to offer.

This novel is exasperating because it is always easy to despise the despicable characters it develops, yet reflection after each portion read forces one to admit a sympathy, albeit reluctantly. Very Dostoyevskian to be sure. Dostoyevsky is no pleasure to read either.

Singer deservedly got the Nobel Prize for Literature years ago and before this masterpiece ever saw the light of day except in Yiddish in serialized form.

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Dark and Epic: Singer rewriting himself

For fans of Singer's writing, there is little new here. All of his classical narrative concerns are on display. But this novel, unpublished during his lifetime, is far more of an immense and deep exploration of his concerns; there is the feeling, when reading this sprawling novel, that he has found yet another angle to explore his fictional concerns, and it is one that is subterranean in its aesthetic. Shadows is staggeringly dark; its vision of humanity, both in the past, present and future, is unremittingly tragic and sorrowful. Singer never lets up, and reading this novel can be fatiguing because of its unrelenting stance toward despair. What saves the novel from perdition, what makes it more than a catalog of gloom, is that it is uttering extremely simple truths, even if they are hard to swallow.

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A modern epic novel..eternal ..humorous and testimonial

Having been in jesuit school during my primary and secondary, I distintly remember a priest who told me I should marry a jewish girl for you have the sort of character that requires it.. he was not mistaken, but the unfolding of that story rivals a novel of IBS... so my wife gave it as a girft and I found a novel in some parts as to be similar to Dovstoyeski, yet modern is some others as Saul Bellow's.. and even humorous as Woody Allen.

Its a story of survivors, of the melting-pot phenomenom of the USA, of the drift of generations and the loss of traditions, of the eternal contradictions, and the difference between a world separated by the holocaust.

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Excellent writing at the service of an impoverished philosophy of life

This is the first book I've read by Singer. Right from the start of the book, he reveals himself as a master craftsman of character and dialogue. His characters are incredibly real and complex. They defy categorization, as real individuals tend to do. Their struggles are very human and believable. The characters are the delicious part of the book. In that respect, it is only towards the last third or fourth of the book, as it becomes obvious that most of the characters are "spinning their wheels" and inadequate character development is taking place, that the book gets rather tedious (and the feeling dawns that this book could have been made shorter). The denouement of Grein's fate is also quite improbable and a let-down.

One thing that will probably prevent me from reading other Singer books, despite his evident skill at character composition, is the "atmosphere" the book is permeated with - the underlying philosophy. The book is rather depressing, filled as it is with characters who experience personal angst, obsessive compulsiveness towards immoral actions, and a personal hollowness and despair. And in the end, there is no redeeming joy or hope to be found. While Grein's alteration could signal hope in something greater, it is arguably portrayed more as the permanent escape from reality of a man in despair, rather than a true conversion filled with genuine faith in greater meaning.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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