in association with the International School of Art
in Umbria, Italy
Shadows on the Hudson : A Novel
by
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Sherman (Translator)
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Hardcover, 548 pages
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux
Publication date: January 1, 1998
Dimensions (in inches): 9.54 x 6.52 x 1.65
ISBN: 0374261865
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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 Kirkus Reviews , 11/01/97:
The late Nobelist (190491) left us yet another gift in this previously untranslated long novel, originally serialized in Yiddish in the Forward more than 40 years ago. The story, set in the late 1940s, begins with a masterly piece of exposition: a dinner party in New York City hosted by Boris Makaver, a refugee whose commercial success has enabled him to indulge his devotion to orthodox religious practices and generosity to friends whose assimilation to their new country has been less successful than his own. Boris's guests include his beautiful daughter Anna, unhappily married to attorney Stanislaw Luria; Professor David Shrage, a mathematician whose wife perished in the Holocaust; a saturnine doctor whose family hides a guilty collaborationist secret; and, most crucially, Hertz Grein, an idealistic scholar who has struck it rich in the stock market and is the object of Anna Luria's adulterous attentions. Singer explores the exhaustive combinings and recombinings of these lives with those of several other richly drawn characters, the most vivid of whom is Anna's first husband Yasha Kotik, a celebrated comic actor who will stop at nothing to achieve success and win back his former wife. Marriages and affairs fall apart; age and death take their toll; the wisdom of the scripture and kabbalah and the precepts of the great philosophers and avatars of modern science are passionately debated in extended conversations that seethe with drama. This is soap opera raised to the level of genius, in a consistently absorbing novel whose amazing breadth and verisimilitude suggest a contemporary Tolstoy. And Singer concludes it triumphantly, in a series of summaries of his several protagonists' fates, all of which are memorably encapsulated in the chastened Hertz Grein's simultaneous self-justification and apologia: ``One cannot keep the Ten Commandments while one lives in a society that breaks them.'' A matchless portrait of human frailty seen from the perspective of a vast compassionate understanding. A major work, from one of the great modern novelists. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The New York Times, Richard Bernstein :
...this book, translated by Joseph Sherman with skillful editing by Jane Bobko and Robert Giroux, is a significant event, a major addition to the English-language Singer oeuvre. It is a startling, piercing work of fiction, a book with a strong claim to being Singer's masterpiece. This is not merely because Shadows on the Hudson is darker than just about any of Singer's other works, more heavily freighted with bitterness and anguish. Despite many passages of caustic humor, this novel is Singer speaking in an unfamiliar raw and brutal voice, the grandfatherly Yiddish writer stripped of the kindly, gentle tone and the flights of supernatural fantasy that we mostly know him by.
Slate, Jonathan Rosen :
Shadows on the Hudson, produced inside the intimacy of the Jewish language and serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward, has an unself-conscious energy and honesty that gives it, even after 40 years, a shocking power.... Singer is very good at evoking the palimpsest imprints of his characters' layered lives in a way that gives them more modernist complexity than his rather conventional conception of character and plot might otherwise have allowed for. He is also good at making their highly personal adventures seem the outgrowth of historical and metaphysical circumstances.
Synopsis:
A major new posthumous novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. Set in New York City, in the late 1940s, "Shadows on the Hudson" details the intertwined lives of a circle of prosperous Jewish refugees. From gloomy West Side apartments to the pastel Yiddish resorts of Miami, Singer covers the territory of American Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
in association with the International School of Art
in Umbria, Italy