Singer Isaac Bashevis. Enemies, A Love Story

Translated from Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin and Elizabeth Shub. — New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. First published 1972. — 280 p.Almost before he knows it, Herman Broder, refugee and survivor of World War II, has three wives: Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who had hidden him from the Nazis; Masha, his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of perpetually impending doom. The first of Singer's novels to be set in America, Enemies, A Love Story tells an unexpected and moving tale.
"Although I did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust, I have lived for years in New York with refugees from this ordeal. I therefore hasten to say that this novel is by no means the story of the typical refugee, his life, and struggle. Like most of my fictional works, this book presents an exceptional case with unique heroes and a unique combination of events. The characters are not only Nazi victims but victims of their own personalities and fates. If they fit into the general picture, it is because the exception is rooted in the rule. As a matter of fact, in literature the exception is the rule." — Isaac Bashevis Singer.