Enemies, A Love Story

In Enemies, A Love Story - an ode to the complicated postwar experience of Holocaust survivors - Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of Herman Broder, a man lost in his own indecisiveness and dishonesty. Almost before he knows it, Herman 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. But the difficulty of navigating his crowded personal life, as well as the general ambiguous experience of Yiddish New York after WWII, leaves Herman with a sense of perpetually impending doom. Praise:

Isaac Bashevis Singer is both an old-fashioned storyteller and a modern psychological writer - The New York Times

The hero of Enemies, A Love Story is a trigamist - a word one doesn’t get to use every day. Herman scuttles about New York with buoyant pessimism and fatalistic sweetness, trying to make his untenable life work. In his first novel set in America, Isaac Bashevis Singer works out this bizarre plot with perfect naturalness and aplomb … Enemies, A Love Story is a brilliant, unsettling novel. - Newsweek

It is a measure of Singer’s strength that he is able to utilize what is essentially a familiar farcical situation - a man married to three wives - to scour the empty room of one human soul pursued by the echoes of real and terrible enemies. - Kirkus Reviews