Enemies, A Love Story

Herman Broder survived the war hidden in a Polish hayloft by Yadwiga, his family's former servant, whom he marries afterward out of gratitude more than love. Believing his first wife Tamara and their children murdered, he has also secretly married Masha, a fellow refugee whose passion is inseparable from her own damage, and is conducting a full life with each woman under different explanations for his frequent absences. When Tamara turns out to have survived after all, Herman's bigamy stops being a metaphor for postwar displacement and becomes a literal, unsustainable arrangement, and Singer plays the resulting chaos, one husband running between three apartments, mostly for comedy, while never letting the comedy erase what produced it.

None of the three women is a type. Yadwiga's earnest, superstitious Catholic faith, Tamara's exhausted and ironic clarity earned in the camps, Masha's operatic hunger for a love commensurate with everything she's lost, read as three different strategies for continuing to live rather than as rivals in a conventional love triangle. Herman himself is less a philanderer than a man with no floor left under him: choosing any one woman would mean admitting that her needs outweigh the catastrophe that produced all three relationships in the first place, and he can't make that admission.

Herman's actual job, uncredited ghostwriter producing sermons and articles under a rabbi's byline, is a small, exact joke about the rest of his life: he's already fluent in living under someone else's name, already practiced at erasing his own authorship. The bigamy he's managing across Brooklyn and Coney Island is the same skill applied to marriage instead of prose, a man who has made concealment into a profession, then into a way of being married three times over without ever fully inhabiting any one of the names attached to him.

Singer wrote the novel in Yiddish for serialization in the Jewish Daily Forward, and set it among the community of Coney Island and Brooklyn refugees rebuilding ordinary life, boardinghouses, synagogues, arranged introductions, within walking distance of people carrying unspeakable losses. Farcical door-slamming misunderstandings and frantic cab rides between wives sit deliberately close to conversations about murdered relatives and vanished towns, and that mixture is Singer's real answer to a harder question: how Yiddish storytelling, comic, gossipy, alert to appetite, keeps functioning at all once the world that produced it has been destroyed.