Author | Isaac Bashevis Singer |
---|---|
Original title | Sonim, di geshikhte fun a libe |
Translator | Aliza Shevrin and Elizabeth Shrub |
Language | Yiddish |
Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | 1966 |
Publication place | United States |
Published in English | 1972 |
Media type | Print (Paperback & Hardback) |
Pages | 228 pp |
ISBN | 0-374-51522-0 |
OCLC | 31348418 |
Enemies, A Love Story (Yiddish : Sonim, di geshikhte fun a libe) is a tragicomedy novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer first published serially in the Jewish Daily Forward on February 11, 1966. [1] [2] The English translation was published in 1972. [3]
It's New York City, a few years after World War II. Herman Broder, a formerly Orthodox Jewish man who has lost his faith but still enjoys Talmudic scholarship, is married to a Polish woman named Yadwiga Pracz, not of Jewish origin, who had worked as a servant in his father's family in Poland and had kept Herman alive, during the Holocaust in Poland, by hiding him in a hayloft in her native village. Almost all Herman's family perished in the Holocaust, including, he believes, his first wife, Tamara, whom an eyewitness told him was shot by the Einsatzgruppen, along with the couple's two children. Broder married Yadwiga after he received a visa for the United States, perhaps partly out of a sense of obligation. He brought her to Brooklyn, and in their apartment in Coney Island, she works diligently as a homemaker, learning how to cook Ashkenazi Jewish foods as matzo balls with borscht, carp's head, and challah, but although there are moments of tenderness between them, it isn't a happy union. He calls her a "peasant" to her face and mocks her desire to undergo conversion to Judaism. He has told her that he works as a book salesman and that he has to travel for his job up and down the Eastern seaboard, but in fact he works as a ghost-writer for a corrupt rabbi in Manhattan named Milton Lampert and the nights that Yadwiga thinks he's on the road, he is in fact spending in the Bronx in a second apartment he secretly rents for his mistress, Masha, a severely traumatized Holocaust survivor, and her mother, a pious woman named Shifrah Puah. Herman isolates himself from the larger Jewish community, in part because he is also traumatised by hiding in the barn during the Holocaust and often daydreams about what it would be like to similarly have to hide for many years in whatever room he happens to be in—in part because he is ashamed of his somewhat disreputable line of work, and in part because he longs to hide his double life with Yadwiga and Masha. This romantic arrangement becomes even more complicated when Herman reads his name in a classified ad in a Yiddish newspaper, answers it, and learns that Tamara also survived the Holocaust and is in New York City. The comedy of the novel consists in Herman's doomed attempts to keep all three women from knowing about one another; the tragedy is in the inability of Herman and other characters to make the accommodations and compromises that would reconcile them to having survived.
The New York Times wrote that "Singer's marvelously pointed humor has turned black and bitter, the sex is flat, and there is little irony or selfconsciousness," and condemned Enemies as "a bleak, obsessive novel that offers neither release nor hope." [4] The Times Literary Supplement (London), on the other hand, praised the novel's "larger moral subtleties" and considered it "a fine addition to a legendary body of work," [5] and the New York Review of Books, after noting that Enemies was "a religious novel in its way," wrote that the book "adds to invention, wit, and observation the sympathetic imagination of a writer of genius and an understanding of the important but cruelly narrow possibilities of this world." [6]
The book was adapted for the theater by Sarah Schulman and premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in 2007. [7]
An eponymous film, based on the book and directed by Paul Mazursky, was released in 1989. [8]
The novel was adapted as an opera by Ben Moore; it premiered at Palm Beach Opera in 2015. [9]
In 2022, the originally serialized novel was released for the first time in book format in standard Yiddish by the Swedish publisher Olniansky Tekst Farlag. Mario Moishele Alfonso transcribed the whole book into standard Yiddish from online copies of the Forverts , and the book was edited by Emil Kalin and Nikolaj Olniansky. [10]
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).
Israel Joshua Singer was a Polish-Jewish novelist who wrote in Yiddish.
Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
Shadows on the Hudson is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. First serialized in The Forward, a Yiddish newspaper, it was published in book form in 1957. It was translated into English by Joseph Sherman in 1997. As a result, Singer did not edit the English translation, as he did with most of his other translated novels. The book follows a group of prosperous Jewish refugees in New York City following World War II, just prior to the founding of the state of Israel. Singer described the novel as the story of group of refugees whose "minds and spirits are still in the old country, although, at the same time they take roots here in New York". Unlike many of Singer's earlier works which are set in Europe, the book takes place entirely in America.
David G. Roskies is an internationally recognized Canadian literary scholar, cultural historian and author in the field of Yiddish literature and the culture of Eastern European Jewry. He is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and Professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Hinde Ester Singer Kreytman, known in English as Esther Kreitman, was a Yiddish-language novelist and short story writer. She was born in Biłgoraj, Vistula Land to a rabbinic Jewish family. Her younger brothers Israel Joshua Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer subsequently became writers.
Enemies, A Love Story is a 1989 American romantic tragicomedy film directed by Paul Mazursky, based on the 1966 novel Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The film stars Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin and Margaret Sophie Stein. The film received positive reviews from critics and three nominations at the 62nd Academy Awards; Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The Family Moskat is a novel written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, originally written in Yiddish. It was Singer's first book published in English.
Shosha is a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. The original Yiddish version appeared in 1974 in the Jewish Daily Forward under the title Soul Expeditions.
Satan in Goray is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It was originally published between January and September 1933 in installments in the Yiddish literary magazine Globus in Poland and in 1935 it was printed as a book. It was Singer's first published novel.
Isaac in America: A Journey With Isaac Bashevis Singer is a 1986 documentary made by director Amram Nowak and producer Kirk Simon. It was broadcast on the PBS series American Masters.
Zalmen Mlotek is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community.
Irene Lieblich was a Polish-born artist and Holocaust survivor noted for illustrating the books of Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and for her paintings highlighting Jewish life and culture. She is also a distant cousin of noted Yiddish language author and playwright Isaac Leib Peretz.
The Slave is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer originally written in Yiddish that tells the story of Jacob, a scholar sold into slavery in the aftermath of the Khmelnytsky massacres, who falls in love with a gentile woman. Through the eyes of Jacob, the book recounts the history of Jewish settlement in Poland at the end of the 17th century. While most of the book's protagonists are Jews, the book is also a criticism of Orthodox Jewish society. The English version was translated by the author and Cecil Hemley.
Alexander Olshanetsky was an American composer, conductor, and violinist. He was a major figure within the Yiddish theatre scene in New York City from the mid-1920s until his death in 1946.
Yevgeny Arye was an Israeli theater director, playwright, scriptwriter, and set designer.
A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories is a 1973 book of short stories written by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It shared the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The twenty-four (24) stories in this collection were translated from Yiddish by Singer, Laurie Colwin, and others.
Evelyn Torton Beck has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Magician of Lublin is a novel by Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Though originally written in Yiddish, it was first published in English in 1960 in the United States by Noonday, and in 1961 in the United Kingdom by Secker & Warburg. In 1971, the book was published in Yiddish by Hamenorah.
The 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Polish-born American Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) "for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life." He wrote prolifically in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators.