Eros and Exile

...We're waiting for an answer.'" This is the tone and these are the sort of characters that one finds in Singer's best work, like his remarkable story, "The Cafeteria...

...And their tragedy is that their fate never seems grand or heroic enough for their passions...

...A budding playwright, eventually a skilled writer of roman feuil-letons and historical biography, Aaron is prone to fall for almost every woman he meets, and to be buffeted about by the winds of female wiles...

...But now modern man must search in a different way...

...To be sure, he must continue to hope for a meaning, but meaning will be given in terms of sexual revelation rather than through any form of Divine message...

...This harks back to those 18th-century picaresques, like Tom Jones, where the hero never forgets his love for a poor girl as he hacks through the jungle of ambition...

...At the forefront of the novel stands Aaron Greidinger, a young man far too honest for his own good, who is known to his intimates as Arele or Tsutsik...

...Now, six years later-too long to wait for a novel from Singer!-comes Shosha, a quintessential tale of the Jewish soul in perpetual exile...

...It, too, portrays lust roaming through a decaying world, specifically, prewar Warsaw-only this time with such intense attention to realistic detail that we are transported into the realm of caricature...

...The parody is reminiscent of Beckett's Waiting for Godot: '"What do you think Tsutsik, is there an answer somewhere or not?' '"No, no answer.' '"Why not?' "'There can't be any answer for suffering-not for the sufferer.' '"In that case, what am I waiting for?' "Genia [Haiml's wife] opened the door...

...Naturally, the final product is a mess, and Tsutsik is too embarrassed even to accept any money...

...Tekla the maid who is as dignified about love as a countess...

...Yet despite this unhappiness, Singer seems to be saying, the world can be explored today only by sensually tasting the variety of life's spices...

...Why are you two sitting in the dark, eh?' "Haiml laughed...

...In fact, their long flirtation often reads like a Woody Allen parody...

...The two of them, wild cartoons of types we all recognize, are the finest characters in the novel, and the tale of Betty's intrusion into Tsutsik's life provides the best and funniest moments in the complicated narrative...

...Shosha, though, goes a step beyond "The Cafeteria" and Enemies: A Love Story: Its purposefully fragmented and wildly hilarious mode may well come to be seen as the ultimate comment on the meaning of exile in our time...

...But his strength and his weakness is his deep and abiding love for one person -the half-mad, haunted Shosha...

...Throughout the book, Singer plays with two notions of love...

...Dora, the misguided Communist who is bourgeois in bed...

...Into his life comes Betty Slonim, however, a rich actress pursued by her own sense of failure...

...Knowing of his love for Shosha, at one point she offers him the ultimate salvation: She will marry him and and they will go to New York with Shosha posing as a maid to fool the customs men...

...He spends the rest of the novel escaping an ever impulsive Betty, intent on saving him from the impending Holocaust and getting him safely to the bosom of New York...

...All of the women Aaron comes into contact with, desires and sleeps with, are unhappy: Celia, the older intellectual who is erotically aroused by learning...

...It has that same abrupt, painfully truthful quality that zigzags back and forth between comic and tragic perception?an effect attributable to Singer's positive genius for describing the wildness of women caught in the throes of ambition and sexual dilemma...

...To her (and to Sam) Tsutsik represents the grand hope, the man who will finally write a play worthy of Betty and make them all rich...

...The characters here-as in the author's previous works, are haunted by dybbuks of their own choosing, avatars of their own worst selves...

...Reviewed by Alex Szogyi Professor of French Literature, Hunter College, City University of New York In 1972 Isaac Bashevis Singer gave us a masterpiece of Jewish amatory surrealism, Enemies: A Love Story...

...No matter which option they choose, though, the characters all end up unhappy...

...In trying to give her the support she needs to live, he senses that by sacrificing himself and marrying her he may save her from herself...

...One is the life-giving and preserving deep love of someone for his chosen bride, and he includes every obligate for this ancient emotion...

...with her impresario producer, Sam Dreiman-a knight errant with loins of gold dedicated to assuring her success in the dingy world of the theatre...

...Before Hitler, before still another dispersal into the diaspora, the old values could be maintained...

...In the last scene, set in Israel, Aaron and Haiml, survivors, sit talking together...

...Shosha's mother, Bashele, left bereft by her husband, Zelig, spends her last years in an orgy of hate, trying to possess her children and fighting her husband, who bribes them with money instead of love...

...Unfortunately, she is also a budding playwright, and like everyone else connected with Aaron's work-in-progress, sticks her dirty fingers into the dialogue...

...and Shosha, the chosen one, troubled forever by the untimely death of her poor sister, Yppe...

...Like Alain Resnais' film of some years ago, Hiroshima Mon Amour, it painted the madness of the flesh against a backdrop of imminent world destruction...

...The result is Chekhovian irony: Everything is seen through the prism of absurdist opera glasses...

...Betty cries out for cinematic treatment and one day an older Diane Keaton, directed by her Svengali, Allen, may perhaps render this creation in the fullness of its comic poignancy...

...She arrives in Warsaw from the U.S...

...the other is total promiscuity...

...their sugar daddy, Sam, fresh from a dangerous prostate operation, will be nursed by them for as long as he may live...