Shadows on the Hudson [Hardcover]

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Author), Joseph Sherman (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 1998

Shadows on the Hudson in set in New York City in the late 1940s and details the intertwined lives of a circle of prosperous Jewish refugees. From gloomy Upper West Side apartments to the pastel Yiddish resorts of Miami, Singer covers the territory of American Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust in this impressively expansive novel.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although Isaac Bashevis Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1935, the circumscribed world of the Polish Jews remained at the heart of his imagination. Beginning with his first major work, Satan in Goray (1935), he used the life of the shtetl as raw material, transforming its folkways, religious practices, superstitions, and sexual habits into superior works of art. From time to time, however, Singer turned his eye upon New World Jews like himself, recording their rapid or reluctant assimilation into the American mainstream. One such book is Shadows on the Hudson.

This massive novel originally was serialized in the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward in 1957. Now it has finally been translated into English--in a capable version by Joseph Sherman--and Singer fans should be very grateful. Center stage is occupied by Boris Makaver, a master builder equally devoted to I-beams and the Talmud, and Anna, his much-married daughter. Fanning out from this duo, however, is a small universe of refugees, all of them served up with Singer's customary brio. (Here's a comical snapshot of a shyster named Hertz Grein: "His nose had a Jewish hook, but then had second thoughts and straightened itself out. His lips were thin, and his blue eyes revealed a curious mixture of bashfulness, sharpness, and something else that was hard to define. Margolin used to say that he looked like a Yeshiva boy from Scandinavia.") As the subplots pile up in an unruly heap, the novel sometimes reveals its installment-plan origins. Still, Singer puts his large cast through some wonderful paces, and the endless talk--for these are characters who truly come alive through the medium of rapid, contentious, Yiddish-accented conversation--allows the author to speculate about destiny, identity, and freedom without slowing his story a whit. As Singer said more than once, "Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?"

From Library Journal

Originally published serially in Yiddish in The Forward, this novel by Nobel Prize laureate Singer relates the lives of Jewish refugees in New York City just after World War II. Wealthy and religious Boris Makaver is challenged by the scandal created when his daughter Anna abandons her second husband, an unemployed lawyer, for a friend of the family, Grein. The latter is torn by his inability to resist the romantic demands of three women (his wife, his long-time mistress, and Anna) and his attempts to return to the religious faith of his father. The lingering effects of the losses in the Holocaust and the influence of communism and godlessness combine with staged seances and the reappearance of Anna's unsavory first husband to provide much spiritual searching. This major novel is a welcome addition to the Singer library. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-?Ann Irvine, Silver Spring Lib., Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 542 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (January 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374261865
• ISBN-13: 978-0374261863
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,098,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Work, July 28, 2002

By 

Lleu Christopher "www.liminalworlds.com" (Hudson Valley, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadows on the Hudson (Paperback)

This is a long, deep novel that deals with some of the fundamental problems of human existence. More than any other writer, Singer (at least in this book) reminds me of Dostoyevsky, whose characters were constantly in existentialist turmoil over questions such as good vs. evil and whether or not there is a God (and if there is, is He good, evil or indifferent?) Of course, while Dostoyevsky was a Christian, all of the characters in Shadows on the Hudson are Jewish holocaust survivors who have recently emigrated to New York from Europe shortly after World War ll. This is something that none of them can forget, even for a day, as many barely escaped while their loved ones perished. Beyond this confrontation with evil and death, the novel is largely about the philosophical war between religious orthodoxy and hedonistic modern life. Contemporary readers who do not come from a strongly religious background may have some difficulty appreciating this dilemma. The mass culture that Singer found vulgar and amoral in the 50s has now all but taken over in America, leaving many people no frame of reference for any other type of existence. While there is much philosophizing, Singer succeeds in creating flesh and blood characters whose moral anguish is not simply abstract, but put to the test in daily life. The character we spend the most time with is Hertz Grein, a middle-aged man whose religious yearnings are in stark contrast to his lifestyle. He is a married man who has had a long affair with another woman. As the novel opens, he is preparing to run off with yet another woman. Grein's behavior through most of this book is both irrational and indefensible. He lies to all three women, and makes all his decisions on the whim of the moment. At the same time, he is hardly without a conscience. On the contrary, he is deeply ashamed of the pain he causes others and desperately wants to redeem himself. Reading Shadows on the Hudson, I got the feeling that Singer himself, as he wrote the book, was struggling with the very issues faced by Grein and his other, equally fascinating and conflicted characters. The central problem posed by the book is the paradox of faith. On the one hand, there is no evidence that God exists. Indeed, the prevalence of suffering and evil suggests an indifferent universe. On the other hand, life without faith is unbearable and leads to a world without meaning or values. Does this mean that we should, even in the absence of evidence, embrace a strict moral code? Although the conclusion of Shadows on the Hudson is somewhat ambiguous, Singer seems to answer this question tentatively in the affirmative. Whether or not you agree (I actually don't), the question is an extremely important one and this book gets to the core of it.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nowhere plans for nobody, August 16, 2004

By 

Bruce Hutton (Spokane, Washington) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadows on the Hudson (Paperback)

"Shadows on the Hudson" is an excellent novel, even better than Singer's similiar but more compact "Enemies, a Love Story". Few writers have ever been able to involve the reader in the inner lives of fictional characters the way Singer could, and fewer still would have been able to make their stories so fascinating when they're all so cynical and often downtrodden, bemoaning God's silence and the corruption of modern man. Singer had a singular talent for exploring the chasm between expectations and reality, how we're almost always let down (and the post-WW2 Jews moreso than practically anyone in history), and how, for some totally inexplicable reason, we keep going. He made the absurd palpable for the modern reader, far better than even Camus and Sartre did, because he was an entertaining storyteller first, and THEN he was a philosopher.

This long, convoluted story of the lives of a half-dozen Jewish intellectuals and businesspeople in New York immediately after the second world war must be Singer's masterpiece. He often explored the same ideas in his novels---the point of existence and the role of the Jew in modern society---and in fact he often used philandering husbands and bitter wives and mistresses as primary characters, but he pulled it all together here into a riveting, beautiful story of obsession, regret, pain, and penitence that you simply don't want to end. That these people, and their endless torturous questions, aren't really important in the long run is precisely the final point of Singer's big novel: we make a tiny, swift ripple in the river and then we're gone, possibly forever; but it is how we grapple with the desires of the body and the needs of the mind and heart that gives our lives substance and form. Without this questioning and searching, without this rending of our spirit by apparently random or viscious events in our lives...without all of it, we would never turn to God. And then our small lives ARE meaningless.

At least, that's what I think Singer is trying to say. In the end, he was a fantastic writer who drew you into the story and kept you guessing until the end. Just like life itself...

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing and Inspiring, January 29, 2002

By 

Linda K. Crawford (Fountain Valley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadows on the Hudson (Paperback)

I'm confused by the reviews complaining about this book's length, its subject matter, pace, characterization, etc. This narrative by Singer probes what people do each second of the day: think, consider, act, evaluate. If this does not hit home, you're not in the market for literature; you're merely in the market to be cheaply entertained.

Although Shadows on the Hudson is an examination of a small circle of individuals distinct in their culture, religion, beliefs and actions it is everybody's story. The constant wrestle between your best and worst self, the constant questions of: Why am I not a better person? Why don't I behave in accordance with my beliefs, with what I know? Why do I love those whom I love? Why do I hate those whom I hate? What is the ramification of my own personal evil and goodness? What is the ramification of another's personal evil and goodness? Is there a God? What is God like? Why is earth life the way it is, replete with sorrow, suffering, happiness, joy, shame, anger?

And after the characters have examined their questions and wrestled their own answers, the bottle points to you: What are your questions? How will you answer them? What will you use your time on earth for? To grow, to consider, to try, to experience and come to terms with your questions, or to ignore those possibilities and instead read books and watch television and movies that only placate you and leave you just as, or worse off, than you were when you began?

Singer has done us all a service with this piece; I have rarely been so moved or stimulated intellectually and spiritually as I have been reading this Nobel prize winning masterpiece. Amazing, amazing work.