Enemies: A Love Story     by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translated by Aliza Shevrin and Elizabeth Shub Original title: Sonim, di gesichte fun a liebe Original language: Yiddish Country: Poland   Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: uk List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

I. B Singer’s extraordinary 1972 novel, written at the height of the great Yiddish writer’s fame, centres on four Holocaust survivors. For those accustomed to the pious images of survivors presented by the likes of Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, however, Enemies: A Love Story will come as a shock. For rather than sanctify the lives of his main characters, he unflinchingly portrays their cruelty, absurdity, and mutual destructiveness. Most disconcertingly of all, the book’s plot has the outward shape of a sex farce, with its central character running haplessly between three women.

With its brilliantly controlled black humour and searing insight into the psychological condition of survivors, Enemies cuts through the well-worn clichés of much Holocaust literature and film.

Enemies is the story of Herman Broder, a survivor who has fled to post-war New York and married his former servant Yadwiga, a Polish peasant who hid him in her hayloft during the war. Whilst living with Yadwiga, he continues an affair with Masha, a beautiful and damaged survivor of the camps. Meanwhile, he discovers that his wife Tamara, presumed killed by the Soviets, has arrived in New York. The novel charts the emotional and sexual chaos that ensues after Tamara’s arrival.

The tension between the novel’s title and subtitle — a ’love story’ about ’enemies’ — goes some way to indicate the instability of the emotional lives of survivors. Love, the book seems to suggest, can never be uncomplicated after the experience of the Holocaust, because the faith and trust that makes love possible has been shattered. Consequently, the affairs portrayed in the book are marked by resentment and deception (Herman and Yadwiga), obsession and destructiveness (Herman and Masha) or simply by utter weariness (Herman and Tamara).

The memory of the Holocaust haunts Herman and his women at every moment, colouring their perception of the world with horror and disgust. This perception is particularly marked in the novel’s portrayal of post-Holocaust American Jewry. Singer shows us a Jewish America dedicated to trivial materialism, bent on forgetting the destruction of its European counterpart. Thus, when Herman takes Masha on a secret vacation at the Jewish holiday resort of Lake George, he is disgusted at the sight of the guests, many of them survivors, gathering in the casino and laughing at vaudeville jokes about rabbis and loose women. For Herman, such vulgarity ’shamed the agony of the Holocaust’. His disgust is equally self-directed, however, for example in his shame at his work as a ghost writer of ’uplifting’ books and sermons on Judaism — a religion in which he can no longer believe — for a rabbi who is too busy investing in real estate to write them himself.

For some, Singer’s apparent failure to show due reverence for the survivors of the Holocaust may come across as presumptuous and tacky. However, for this reader at least, Singer’s blackly comic vision in this small masterpiece is intended not to trivialise the experience of the survivors, but to bring out their ineradicable humanity, in all its painful complexity. Perhaps this is, after all, the truest and most respectful relationship to the survivors of Nazism a writer can assume.

’"In a hundred years, the ghettos will be idealized and the impression created that they were inhabited only by saints. There could be no greater lie. First of all, how many saints are there in any generation? Second of all, most of the really pious Jews perished. And among those who managed to survive, the great drive was to live at any cost. In some of the ghettos, they even ran cabarets. You can imagine what cabarets! You had to step over dead bodies to get in."’ p130