I.B. Singer really achieves an amazing accomplishment with his Nobel Prize-winnning novel Enemies, A Love Story. In it, the reader is introduced to Herman Broder--a Holocaust survivor living with his wife in Brooklyn. His wife is Yadwiga, a Gentile peasant girl from Poland. She saved his life during the war by hiding him in her hayloft for three years. It doesn't take long before we discover that he is lying to her about his traveling salesman job in order to perpetrate an affair with Masha--another Holocaust survivor. Herman's life, it turns out, is absolutely composed of deception. Even his real job as a ghost writer for a charlatan rabbi hints at his dishonesty. He fabricates everything to his wife, his mistress, and his employer.
The plot thickens when his first wife Tamara--whom he thought killed during the Holocaust--tracks him down. His false life gradually begins to implode.

         The plot of this novel is entertaining as well as enlightening. The characters are so three-dimensional that the reader has to constantly remind themselves that they are fictional. The situations Herman puts himself in will keep the pages turning. What makes this novel truly exceptional, though, are the things that it shows us. One of the main points is that a person is not defined as a Holocaust Survior. Anyone lucky enough to survive such a catastrophe still has an entire life to live afterwards. Singer gives us several such lives in this novel, each one so completely individual that they really stand out as real people. The other point is that the Holocaust may have changed people's lives, but it didn't create people. Herman Broder is neurotic, but as the story progresses, the reader learns that has been a part of his nature since long before the Holocaust. He was a terrible husband and father prior to WWII. All his nightmarish experience in the hayloft did was to exacerbate his worst qualities. We also see, in some of the other characters, that the tragedy they experienced served to strengthen their character rather than destroy it.

         If this novel teaches us anything, it is that a person’s ability to survive—-both something like the Holocaust and life afterwards—-depends very much on their individual nature. What kind of person they were before, what they learn during oppression, and how they choose to use that knowledge afterwards varies very much from person to person. Being a target of the Holocaust doesn’t make one a saint, it just makes them a person in a terrible situation. What they make of that situation is up to them—-and their actions show what kind of person they really are. This is the insight readers rarely get from photographs, articles, or news reels. With these stories, statistics become individuals and victims become human beings. Hats off to I.B. Singer.

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Created Nov 29, 2005 at 8:43am • Submit your own review...