Behind a Shell of Illusions

...each played its own role, demanded its own share of immortality...

...a Polish actress is hired to play Luria's dead wife...

...She apparently had no neck, for her head sat directly on her shoulders...

...His breakdown and death set in motion a tidal wave of guilt, personal upheaval and wild convolutions of plot...

...Leftists are universally lambasted as fools: "You spit in their faces and they think it's raining...

...and man's fallibility in the face of forces beyond his control...

...Their steadfast belief is seen as a rejection of the corrupting influence of modem life...

...Written in Yiddish 40 years ago as a Jewish Daily Forward serial and translated now for the first time, Shadows on the Hudson is the fourth Singer novel published since his death in 1991...

...Like many of Singer's male protagonists, Grein has a complicated love life...

...By day he was absorbed in commercial dealings like any businessman," Singer writes, "but at night he was overcome by self-condemnation, an enormous remorse, a grief that harrowed his heart like physical pain...

...The Master of the Universe was silent," says Morris Gombiner, who has made his unlikely way from Majdanek to Miami...

...Singer is highly regarded as a Modernist, more in the spirit of Kafka than Balzac, but Shadows is a throwback, an old-fashioned, realistic novel that is plotdriven, highly episodic and populated with a large cast of richly described, colorful characters...

...When Singer was writing this novel in 1957, many were convinced that Yiddish was a dying language, that the religious life he knew as a child in Poland was finished, that the Holocaust had killed not only 6 million Jews but an entire culture...

...words were deeds, thoughts possessed magical power...

...Some flounder and some thrive, but all are stock actors from Singer's repertory company—intellectuals manqué and skeptics, misfits and schlemiels, free thinkers and charlatans...

...the evils of Left-wing politics...

...He was all that remained...

...But it is Hertz Grein, the man Anna runs off with, who carries the moral burden of Shadows on the Hudson...

...Boris Makaver, around whom most of the plot revolves, lives in a building that closely resembles the Belnord at West 86th Street and Broadway, where Singer himself lived...

...As if he has not suffered enough, Morris Gombiner, who survived Majdanek by teaching himself not to think, is saddled with a monstrous second wife, a loud, quasi-Marxist bully who dwarfs her husband: "Mrs...

...When Boris' daughter Anna leaves her second husband, the survivor Stanislaw Luria, for another man, Luria decides to contact his wife and children who were murdered by the Nazis through a séance...

...Without restraint or compunction, they had shot, hanged, poisoned, burned—and he alone, the survivor, had escaped to bring the tidings to Job...

...The book is rife with his familiar obsessions: paranormal activities, such as séances and mental telepathy...

...The world created by the growing number of Haredim in Israel and Chasidic sects in America has proved otherwise...

...I did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler Holocaust," Singer wrote, perhaps ironically, in an author's note to Enemies, A Love Story, a novel written nine years after Shadows on the Hudson that also deals with Jewish refugees in New York during the 1940s...

...The Holocaust has obliterated forever the world Singer came from—the Eastern European yeshivas and rabbinical courts, and the Jewish intelligentsia of Warsaw...

...Only a skilled spinner of tales like Singer could get away with some of the strained coincidences and absurd connections between people here...

...Singer attempts to deflect the problem of writing about the Holocaust with barbed humor and ridicule...

...Anna's first husband, Yasha Kotik, an actor who miraculously emerges from Stalin's purges, is portrayed as an amoral schemer and shyster, a court jester in clown's clothing, a tummler who is applauded for making fun of Eastern European Jews on the stage...

...Warsaw had gone up flames, all its Jews were ash," Grein thinks...

...The author was under a constant, inexorable deadline, and while he was a fluent, prolific writer, the pressure shows: This is a big, baggy monster of a book that has the narrative speed of a locomotive and the finely timed, melodramatic crises of a soap opera...

...the moral righteousness of vegetarianism...

...Gombiner was a stout woman with a huge bosom, a pockmarked face, a narrow brow, and huge flapping jowls that hung down like slabs of dough...

...A belief in God and a life proscribed by Jewish religious ritual has been thrown into question by the brutal death of millions of Jews...

...Religious Jews are idealized as morally superior: They "seduced no women, drove no people to death, sickness, madness...

...Others are subjected to the same merciless, sarcastic wit...

...Yet Luria never recovers from the shockof speaking to his martyred wife...

...The author's unease at having sat out the War safely, if impoverished, in the United States, is evident throughout Shadows...

...Grein joins "God's army" and spends his days studying Talmud, thereby re-enacting and recreating the life destroyed by the Holocaust...

...But this novel is not unrelievedly dark...

...A flat nose and a pair of unfriendly, squinting eyes above deep circles completed the face...

...the chaos caused by sexual desire...

...An amateur psychic and widowed dentist, Henrietta Clark, conducts a séance that is a hilarious sendup, full of pratfalls and obvious hokey tricks...

...In the Forward it ran twice a week and consisted of over 100 installments...

...In Shadows on the Hudson Singer tells us: "What was past was not over, what had died was not dead...

...Looming over everyone is the shadow of the Holocaust, which in the time frame of the novel—1948—is still a recent, vivid event: "All these shadows accompanied them...

...He began to list in his mind the members of his own family who had been exterminated in Poland: his brother Dovid Meyer, his two sisters, their children, grandchildren, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law...

...Eventually, after hundreds of pages and many tortuous twists of the plot, Grein repents...

...philosophical digressions that question God's existence...

...Like Joseph Shapiro, the hero of The Penitent (1983), he rejects modern life as "the culture of the underworld," and moves to Mea Shearim, the religious enclave in the newly created State of Israel...

...although married, he has had a mistress for many years before he takes up with Anna...

...He has become a successful Wall Street broker, a libertine, an assimilated American Jew whose children marry Gentiles...

...History—in the form of Hitler and Stalin—has shaken the characters in Shadows loose from European life and thrown them up onto the shores of the Hudson River...

...Unlike messages brought by dybbuks and poltergeists from the world beyond in Singer's fiction, this séance is clearly a sham and a farce...

...In the impenetrable darkness, Boris found a chair, turned it over, as on Tisha b'Av [a day of fasting], and sat down on it...

...He came to America in 1935, following his older brother, the novelist I. J. Singer, whose works include The Brothers Ashkenazi, Yoshe Kalb and The Family Carnovsky...

...Grein is the son of a revered holy man, Reb Jacob the Scribe, and a former child prodigy who was Anna's tutor in Warsaw...

...and he smothered his sorrow in sexual fantasies, wanton talk, debauched desires...

...Reviewed by Lore Dickstein Contributor, New York "Times Book Review" Anyone who remembers the Upper West Side of the 1940s—when one could hear Polish, Yiddish, German, Hungarian, and Czech spoken on the street, when the Tip Toe Inn, the Eclair, the Automat, and the cafeterias and dairy restaurants on Broadway (all now defunct) fed a displaced café society of Jewish refugees, when the single room occupancy hotels provided cheap but decent housing for ladies and gentlemen fallen on hard times —will feel as if they have entered a time warp, a world of virtual reality, in I. B. Singer's new posthumous novel...

...The women, seldom sympathetically portrayed in a Singer novel, are either chaste, religious saints, nagging harridans, or sexual Liliths who cause endless trouble for hapless men...

...For Grein, sexual arousal has an existential reward: "a person became one with das Ding an sich, with the very essence of being that lay behind the shell of illusions...

...It is studded with plot summaries and other reminders to readers who may have missed a few episodes or gotten lost in the intricate, baroque story line...