Enemies, a Love Story

Enemies, a Love Story is a novel by the Polish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in English in 1972 after being serialised in the Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish in 1966.

The book is set in New York a few years after the Second World War, among survivors of the Holocaust who are rebuilding lives in a country they came to by accident. Herman Broder is a man who lost his faith but not his appetite for study, and he is married to Yadwiga, the Polish woman who hid him and who is not Jewish; he has a mistress, Masha, who is his true love; and his first wife, Tamara, whom he believed to be dead, has turned up alive. Singer tells the story as a comedy of a man trying to keep three lives separate, and the comedy keeps turning into something else, because none of the three women is as helpless as Herman assumes. Singer wrote in Yiddish throughout his career and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.