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Books: Enemies, A Love Story

Some tales could only come to life — and make sense — in a particular time and place.

In I.B. Singer’s “Enemies, A Love Story” Jewish refugee Herman Broder makes a home in Coney Island with his pregnant wife Yadwiga, who’s a Gentile. In the Bronx, he keeps his ravishing mistress, Masha, and her devout mother, Shifrah Puah. On the Lower East Side, Herman’s first wife Tamara shows up, seemingly risen from the dead; she’d been shot but not killed by the Nazis who took their young children.

Herman supports these women writing sermons, books and speeches for a world-famous rabbi. He’s not fooling himself: he is “a fraud, a transgressor — a hypocrite, too. The sermons he wrote for Rabbi Lampert were a disgrace and a mockery.”

At any other time in modern history, Herman would be a schmuck. But his situation makes sense: he stays with Yadwiga because she saved his life in Poland, hiding him in a hayloft at her family’s farm. He can’t live without Masha, so when she insists on marriage, he does, in a Jewish ceremony. Tamara won’t divorce him.

The situation sounds like a comedy but their lives are suffused with tragedy. Herman rises with a bruised forehead, dreaming the Nazis are bayoneting him in the hayloft. The dead speak to Masha when she sleeps; she wakes Herman to show him, again and again, the scars on her body. Yadwiga is still terrified by the journey to America; she won’t ride the subway, look at the ocean or walk farther than a few blocks. Tamara isn’t attracted to Herman anymore but they shared a life; they had children, whom they mourn.

How it all plays out is unexpectedly moving.

Herman’s tangled romances feed the plot; his inner thoughts provide the texture, scenery and black humor that make this book such a rich read. To Herman, the dreary Bronx street where Masha lives “couldn’t make up its mind whether to remain part of the neighborhood or to give up and disappear.” When he first sees Tamara again, he notes her American clothes and bright makeup “like a stale loaf of bread put in a hot oven to be freshened up.” Nazis haunt his every meal, even on vacation. “Somewhere on this lovely summer morning, fowl were being slaughtered; Treblinka was everywhere.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

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