Serialized in the late 1950s, Shadows On The Hudson was translated from Yiddish and published posthumously as a complete novel in 1998, receiving widespread literary acclaim. From the Upper West Side to Miami's pastel resorts, Shadows On The Hudson traces the intertwined destiny of survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer has created a vibrant, resonant, and provocative cast of characters in search of answers to life's greatest dilemmas, challenges, and ironies.
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?"
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Excellent writing at the service of an impoverished philosophy of life:
This is the first book I've read by Singer. Right from the start of the book, he reveals himself as a master craftsman of character and dialogue. His characters are incredibly real and complex. They defy categorization, as real individuals tend to do. Their struggles are very human and believable. The characters are the delicious part of the book. In that respect, it is only towards the last third or fourth of the book, as it becomes obvious that most of the characters are "spinning their wheels" and... more info
a brilliant novel but no fun to read:
Had it been published in English when it was written, shortly after WWII, it would have been ignored as the story of a mere milieu. Today it is the story of Everyman. These Jewish refugees in New York after the Holocaust, relatively prosperous since the truly poor had no means of escaping Hitler, display all the Angst, ambivalence, rootlessness and indecision of modern mankind. They cannot decide between reason and faith, modernity and tradition, America and Europe. Their God is no comfort and his... more info
A modern epic novel..eternal ..humorous and testimonial:
Having been in jesuit school during my primary and secondary, I distintly remember a priest who told me I should marry a jewish girl for you have the sort of character that requires it.. he was not mistaken, but the unfolding of that story rivals a novel of IBS... so my wife gave it as a girft and I found a novel in some parts as to be similar to Dovstoyeski, yet modern is some others as Saul Bellow's.. and even humorous as Woody Allen. Its a story of survivors, of the melting-pot phenomenom of the... more info
Dark and Epic: Singer rewriting himself:
For fans of Singer's writing, there is little new here. All of his classical narrative concerns are on display. But this novel, unpublished during his lifetime, is far more of an immense and deep exploration of his concerns; there is the feeling, when reading this sprawling novel, that he has found yet another angle to explore his fictional concerns, and it is one that is subterranean in its aesthetic. Shadows is staggeringly dark; its vision of humanity, both in the past, present and future, is... more info
