Over the past six weeks, I’ve read a dozen books on or by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Shadows on the Hudson was the latest.
I feel like Singer repeated himself:
* The protagonist becomes vegetarian
* Tires of the modern world because of its paganism
* Protagonist prone to all or nothing arguments (either completely religious or completely irreligious)
* Protagonist torn between three women (a la Enemies: A Love Story)
This book was serialized in Yiddish in 1957 and 1958 in the pages of the socialist and extremely anti-Communist Jewish Daily Forward. Reading it reveals that it is no surprise that it took four decades for it to be translated into English. The book deals with a handful of New York Jews, almost all of them refuges from Nazism, in the immediate post-war period. Although most of them are in reasonably comfortable circumstances, they are almost all deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, some of which they survived, while others lost their loved ones. At the same time the characters worry about the equivalent tyranny of Stalin at the beginning of the Cold war (a point Singer constantly reiterates) and how some of their relatives are becoming (uniformly stupid) Communists themselves. Into this depressing situation comes the love affair between Anna Luria, daughter of the wealthy, devout businessman Boris Makaver, and Hertz Grein, a former scholar and now a successful stockbroker. Both of the couple are married, and Grein also has a hysterical mistress that he cannot get free of.
So far, so interesting. But I am afraid the book is a failure. I can understand why Singer would be deeply pessimistic about Judaism and the fate of the world. But the tone is one of hysteria, and however reasonable that might be as a response, it is not successful literature. The essential ideology portrayed is that only absolute devotion to the narrowest and most rigid Orthodoxy can save modern Jewry. The only alternatives presented are the aforementioned stupid Communists, and the most nihilistic sort of atheism. Over and over again various characters state that a Just God could not allow this sort of suffering to His people, and that it would be better if He did not exist at all. But then they usually conclude that atheism invariably leads to the nihilism of totalitarianism, and that therefore the most rigid Orthodoxy is the only solution. Now granted, these characters are not Singer himself. And there are signs that he undercuts his character’s Orthodoxy. It will not escape the reader that as Anna’s and Hertz’s relationship collapses it is Hertz who bemoans and wails his lot. But it is actually Anna who goes out of her way to rescue her father from his own poor financial judgement even after he denounces her as a slut. Meanwhile Grein is horrified that his children are both marrying Gentiles, and disassociates himself from them. He shows no interest when his daughter-in-law thinks about converting to Judaism. "I don’t accuse others, only myself," he claims, though in fact he has denounced his daughter as a whore for sleeping with her boyfriend. One might think that an adulterer, who repeatedly betrays the three women he is involved with, could care more for his own children. At another point Grein goes to a synagogue and he comments on how much more generous and kind the congregants are to him, in a way that Zionists and Communists wouldn’t. Later, however, he complains that the congregation is as selfish and envious as everyone else. His idealization of the old Polish shetls is undercut by Dr. Margolin’s reminder that he lost five siblings to infant mortality. As the book concludes Grein claims his loyalty to Orthodoxy is absolute, even though he doesn’t really believe in Sinai, or much else.
So one could think that Grein is neurotic and a hypocrite. But the fact that his perspective, repeated by several other characters, is the one that is endlessly reiterated throughout the novel can help drown out one’s reservations about his conduct. The only time Jews collectively show any dignity in the novel it is at religious functions or in the company of the Orthodox characters. Elsewhere, whether it is on vacation, or in business, or at political meetings, or in the world of show business the characters are shockingly crass. Another problem is the repetitive quality of the book, whether it is Grein’s conversations about religion or his contacts with his mistress. The constant condemnations of pornography, of violent movies, of pro-female alimony laws are repeated without any real detail or nuance or illumination. Were it not for the criticism of Hitler and the occasional vegetarianism, much of it could have been repeated by Al-Qaedya. There is also an anti-feminism in the book, which only supports Grein’s sexual bad faith ("a woman is not governed by reason but by emtions, instinct, fashion, or plain stubborness, against which rational arguments do not avail"). And portraying Grein as the slave of passion subtly blurs his responsibility for his sex life. Certainly the picture of America which emerges is extremely unflattering: assimilation at its worst. There is almost no attempt to deal with Gentiles. Not only is there the tactless reference to an Afrrican-American whose heart, says the book, is supposedly still in the jungle. But the characters immediately think the worst of the Germans they occasionally run into. Most of Singer’s work tended to ignore Gentiles, but you cannot write a novel about the aftermath of the Holocaust which assumes that the vast majority of humanity consists only of shadows.
