Customer Reviews

Shosha

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a haunting and compelling novel about love, loss, redemption and the horrors of the holocaust.

Set in Jewish Warsaw just before its destruction, Aaron Greidinger, an aspiring writer has the chance to flee and survive the horrors that are to come by heading for the safe shores of America.

However he finds he is compelled to stay on, forsaking safety and riches for the simplistic love of Shosha his childhood friend, now a girl-woman for whom time has stood still. Intellectually stunted yet surprisingly wise, Shosha has always loved Aaron, and as death dogs them in the guise of the inevitable destruction of Jewish Warsaw, Shosha and Aaron begin a doomed love affair that will reverberate though the blood and ashes of Poland, to the birth of nation half a world away, Israel...

A wonderful book, that is a richly satisfying read from beginning to end.

In Shosha Singer reminds us to focus on the journey as human beings rather than on any specific destination. Shosha, as a love story, asks us to look at what it means to be a living, thinking, feeling being even as the world falls inexorably into a chaos where definitions of normalcy no longer make sense. Even as Hitler, the Nazis, the Communists and, indeed, much of an uncaring western world threatened the continued existence of European Jews our cast of characters persisted in their exploration of the nature of God and man. While enmeshed in their rituals of relationship and love, they seek to make sense of the perils of day to day existence in an anti-Semitic world.

This is a book that allows the reader to look at the world as it was in the late thirties and forties, looking outward from the hearts and minds of a thriving Jewish community soon to be decimated. We see what the consequences were for people who chose for centuries to not lift up the sword. Past, present and future seem to exist simultaneously. Spiritual and intellectual exploration thrive even in the face of personal and cultural annihilation. There is a somewhat distant and dreamlike quality to the life, loves and adventures of Singer's characters, but it fits the events as they unfold. And, while the story ends with the birth of Israel and new beginnings for survivors of the holocaust, we are reminded that what was continues to live only as long as those who were there are alive to relate the facts, to tell their stories. We are cautioned that when individual and collective realities that surround evil, suffering and loss are lost the universe becomes ever more flawed. This is a tale of evil and catastrophe, as well as a tale of hopefulness and wonder and resilience of the human spirit.

A copy of this book sat on my shelf unread for a long time. I am glad that I read it now, given the almost surreal times in which we are living. Singer's tale of love and survival of the human spirit is as relevant now as it was when it was written. It is not an easy book to read, but one well worth reading.

"Shosha" is the story of a young writer's (Aaron Greidinger) committed love for a girl by the name of Shosha, from whom he falls in love at the age of seven. Althoug Shosha is a backward girl, intellectually below the level of the writer, he is unable to disregard her and although pursued by a number of other women, Greindinger returns to Shosha. It parallels his struggle to uproot himself from a society that is disrupted and doomed to die. To a great extent it is autobiographical, reflecting the conflict between communist political ideas and the laws of the Torah, Poland's ghetto life in the 30's, and the author's early struggle as a writer. Despite its simplicity in narration, the story is powerful, with a number of strong characters, with reversal of plots, reminding the fact that the story was developed to be published as journalist serial. As characteristic in all of Singer's writing deep philosophical questions are brought up, adding spice to a turbulent plot by itself reflecting an era of dramatic changes.

This book about a playwright and the artistic community into which he falls takes great pains to remind the reader that these people are Jews in Poland in the 1930s and that their entire way of life will soon be destroyed. The title character is the embodiment of innocence which the narrator desperately wants but has no tolerance for; a fact painfully spelled out for him by the other women in his life. Deftly the plot spins out of control and the people began talking more and more and before you know it you are in the ideas of what is God? Why do people suffer? Who makes the universe? What should be our place in it? Some of the most profound and compelling insights fall from the characters' lips. So profound that you forget that the plot has fallen by the wayside. Like Kundera, Singer can give us philosophy and compelling storyline and succeed marvelously in both

This man cannot write a weak novel. The character though not lovable are quite intelligent and understandable; you feel for their plight. This is a novel illustrates the life of Polish/Russian jews without the romanticism and sentimentality you often see in literature that illustrates the plight of the jews during World War Two. It is a powerful novel that you will find impossible to forget.

A beautiful mosaic of people, ideas, and loves make up this heart-wrenching tale of human desire, intellect, and dignity. An aspiring writer and a man of the modern world, Aaron has left behind his home and the ways of his parents and grandparents on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. A patron of the city's Writer's Club, young Aaron is part of a social circle that includes Yiddishists, socialists, and Zionists, both men and women, all hoping to make something of themselves in a hostile world that somehow, on the eve of the Holocaust, still seems to them promising and full of opportunity. No matter his intelligence and talent, at heart Aaron is as inextricably tied to a past, personal and cultural, as his heart is bound to his childhood love, and when he rediscovers Shosha on a visit to Krochmalna, the simple truths of love and the depths of human compassion and dignity are movingly brought to bear.

Several years ago while I was a student at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts I had the good fortune to hear Dr. Yehuda Bauer, perhaps the world's foremost expert on the shtetl. This is a vanished world that few scholars can discuss any longer and one of its most daunting demands is its formidable linguistic challenges. Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish and Russian are hardly the close cousins of English and its Romantic language roots. To delve into the few primary source materials that exist in this field is hardly a task for the faint of heart. Dr. Bauer knows more than ten languages and is able to navigate this terrain with expertise but as for the rest of us? I suppose I feel like John Keats when the Odyssey was translated for 19th century English readers. We are awaiting the entrance to an exhibit our wildest imaginations cannot apprehend or, for that matter, anticipate. Dr. Bauer can keep an interested audience spellbound by his intimate details of this vanished world and you realize when you listen to him that when he is gone a very valuable bit of history and tradition will be disappearing with him.

And so we have Singer. As a Jew, I know very well that there are elements of my ancestry that are beyond my grasp. Reading Shosha, there is a strange familiarity; not with the Polish names but with a Jewish sensibility that has been passed along to me by my family. If you are a Jew -an Ashkenazic Jew reasonably educated both culturally and religiously- there are fingerprints in this work you will think you've seen before. The Warsaw ghetto is filled with old Jewish men and women who live by the word of God, who spend each waking hour in devotion to tradition. This dedication separates them from the modernity surrounding them. Of course their Polish neighbors don't understand them, they are enraptured by gnostic texts that speak vividly of a world that dissipated long before the diaspora to Poland. This is a metaphysical realm not of ressurections but of divinations. There is no palpable realm of the messiah who will deliver Jews from their misery. It is within these texts that, one might argue, these Jews inhabit an apostolic and epistolary reality that makes sense only to them. And that world is not modern. The modern is to be held at arms length, to be suspected and apprehended but never assimilated.

Singer, writing from the United States, left this world before the Nazis moved in and obliterated nearly every last inch of it. The study houses of Warsaw did manage to come to New York, but they became artifacts rather than centers of Jewish thought. American Jews (even the most devout) became assimilated, praising American progress which was the "gift" of modernity. The gnostic, metaphysical realm of ethereal traditions would never assert itself in the lives of a majority of Jews again.

Why might Jews who read this text understand this? I would only wager that there is something in this suspicion of modernity, this over-the-shoulder regard of society that remains, like an inside joke, in the conscience of Jews. But non-Jews should not be turned away. Singer makes this esoteric world oddly accessible. His gift, in my eyes, is to take fumblers like myself, people who really couldn't navigate these distinct and undulant cultural waters and make us see the beauty in it. It is a universal beauty; a humor that speaks of the collective aspirations of a people who have had mostly cause for despair if not, on their best days, ambivalence about redemption in this life.

Read this book. It is a touching story whose sublimity is its tragic humor, it's acceptance of defeat as a pre-requisite for uncertain, unpromised, but still possible victory.

Five stars.

I had read almost all of Singer but never this one. In his many chronicles of the Jews of Old Poland, Singer has brought all their pungent energies to life - the dedication to Torah study and observance, along with superstition, magic, demons, angels, food, love, sex, marital infidelity, even a fascination with communism. But he has mostly stayed away from the reality which ended that rich world; the Holocaust. Shosha is different. For the first time Singer wraps his narrative around the certainty that Hitler will invade Poland and destroy these people. Their various reactions - fatalism, Messianism, denial - are realistic and terribly sad. There is no theme of resistance; the Jews of Poland perceived little control over their destiny. The near suicidal depression of many of the characters is deeply upsetting to read. It was not until the founding of Israel that Jewish energy turned from helplessness to an assertive struggle for life. Singer was clearly swept up in this real life drama as he wrote Shosha, to the point of losing or purposely letting drift the plot thread as personal lives are taken over by a global tragedy.

The thread of the story is the narrator's love and devotion to the mentally challenged girl Shosha, to the point of marrying and protecting her and giving up his dissolute love affairs with sophisticated women. Indeed the author is twice offered escape to a safe America and twice rejects it in order to care for Shosha. The mystery throughout the book is why the protagonist does this; otherwise he is a very selfish man. My reading is that this love story is Singer's personal response to the Holocaust. The girl Shosha stands for Singer's bond with the Jewish people in their innocence and inability to defend themselves. Here is a man who no longer believes in G-d but nevertheless sacrifices himself to protect this innocence and purity, to make a gesture. It is a very moving story. It ends with an epilogue in Israel, with yet another kind of crazy life, but a new pride. Singer's final word: We are still waiting for the answers.

This book was published in the year Singer won the Nobel Prize and shows why his work will long be remembered.

Shosha is a great book by one of the leading authors of the 20th century. It is a beutiful love story with a difference.

Singer writes an odd and completely compelling love story. I read this book every couple of years and always find it fresh and interesting. It has elements of the history of the Jews in Warsaw before the war but it's really a story about truth - truth in regards to yourself and truth in regards to learning what is really important.

Shosa is such a simple and plain girl without any ambition. She is completely unimposing and naïve yet, somehow, against her humble persona you feel that all your `important' troubles are just not that important.

I also like how Singer sets up a love affair that examines the clashing worlds of modern Jewishness: on one side is a progressive liberal intelligencia almost drunk with new ideas while on the other side is an age-old culture that remains immoveable in its ancient wisdom.

Great book that should be read and reread.