Shadows on the Hudson

Rating:
Summary: Nowhere plans for nobody
Review: "Shadows on the Hudson" is an excellent novel, even better than Singer's similiar but more compact "Enemies, a Love Story". Few writers have ever been able to involve the reader in the inner lives of fictional characters the way Singer could, and fewer still would have been able to make their stories so fascinating when they're all so cynical and often downtrodden, bemoaning God's silence and the corruption of modern man. Singer had a singular talent for exploring the chasm between expectations and reality, how we're almost always let down (and the post-WW2 Jews moreso than practically anyone in history), and how, for some totally inexplicable reason, we keep going. He made the absurd palpable for the modern reader, far better than even Camus and Sartre did, because he was an entertaining storyteller first, and THEN he was a philosopher.

This long, convoluted story of the lives of a half-dozen Jewish intellectuals and businesspeople in New York immediately after the second world war must be Singer's masterpiece. He often explored the same ideas in his novels---the point of existence and the role of the Jew in modern society---and in fact he often used philandering husbands and bitter wives and mistresses as primary characters, but he pulled it all together here into a riveting, beautiful story of obsession, regret, pain, and penitence that you simply don't want to end. That these people, and their endless torturous questions, aren't really important in the long run is precisely the final point of Singer's big novel: we make a tiny, swift ripple in the river and then we're gone, possibly forever; but it is how we grapple with the desires of the body and the needs of the mind and heart that gives our lives substance and form. Without this questioning and searching, without this rending of our spirit by apparently random or viscious events in our lives...without all of it, we would never turn to God. And then our small lives ARE meaningless.

At least, that's what I think Singer is trying to say. In the end, he was a fantastic writer who drew you into the story and kept you guessing until the end. Just like life itself...

Rating:
Summary: Flickering Shadows
Review: "Shadows on the Hudson", like Isaac Bashevis Singer, has passion, power and ultimately no faith in modern life. His lothario alter-ego Grein's adventure when he runs off with the married daughter of a friend, Anna, sends ripples through their whole social world, in which Singer paints the moral universe of post-war American Jewery. The Yeshiva trained doctor and friend of Anna's millionaire father takes back the German wife who left him for a Nazi. The Berlin Yiddish comedian Yasha Kotik, Anna's first husband, is beastly enough to survive both the death camps and Broadway. Grein's old Warsaw friend survived the camps to make a horrendous marriage with a battleaxe in Florida who tries to swindle Anna over real estate. ... But there is no escaping the sense of scenes written to a set word count, to be read on a subway train in slow columns from a smudging rag, and there is no escaping the sense of perfunctoriness at Singer's tying up of the loose threads at the end: Grein, like many of Singer's sinning alter-egos, winds up repenting, cutting off all links to his earthly life and loves, taking up Jewish study in a yeshiva. The rest he abandons, more or less moved on, no more resolved, because really the values Singer prized cannot exist for them. The penultimate line of the novel, in a letter from Grein's cell in Jerusalem: "There can be no connection between a bound animal and an animal that roams free." Singer was condemned to roam free, remembering a world that no longer exists and atoning for a family and life long gone, and this book does not return that world to us, though his wilder, more forlorn fiction does.

Rating:
Summary: Echoes Of The Holocaust
Review: Although I agree with the criticisma made by other readers, I still loves "Shadows On The Hudson" and consider it a worthwhile and engrossing book.

Singer writes about a small group of exciles who survived the Holocaust be fleeing to New York City and creating a community in the shadows of the Hudson river. It was here that they contemplated their devastaing past and doubious future.

The characters are intelleigent and intense, anguished by their expulsion from their homeland and the collapse of their cultural and religious values.

Rating:
Summary: utterly astonishing
Review: I'm confused by the reviews complaining about this book's length, its subject matter, pace, characterization, etc. This narrative by Singer probes what people do each second of the day: think, consider, act, evaluate. If this does not hit home, you're not in the market for literature; you're merely in the market to be cheaply entertained.

Although Shadows on the Hudson is an examination of a small circle of individuals distinct in their culture, religion, beliefs and actions it is everybody's story. The constant wrestle between your best and worst self, the constant questions of: Why am I not a better person? Why don't I behave in accordance with my beliefs, with what I know? Why do I love those whom I love? Why do I hate those whom I hate? What is the ramification of my own personal evil and goodness? What is the ramification of another's personal evil and goodness? Is there a God? What is God like? Why is earth life the way it is, replete with sorrow, suffering, happiness, joy, shame, anger?

And after the characters have examined their questions and wrestled their own answers, the bottle points to you: What are your questions? How will you answer them? What will you use your time on earth for? To grow, to consider, to try, to experience and come to terms with your questions, or to ignore those possibilities and instead read books and watch television and movies that only placate you and leave you just as, or worse off, than you were when you began?

Singer has done us all a service with this piece; I have rarely been so moved or stimulated intellectually and spiritually as I have been reading this Nobel prize winning masterpiece. Amazing, amazing work.

Rating:
Summary: Fearlessly honest, even about fear; true, and beautiful
Review: Shadows on the Hudson is one of the best novels I've ever read. The people are real--and thank god, they're deeply sexual and deeply intelligent. Some readers are irked by the one, some by the other characteristic; by me a novel flops if the people are too dumb, or too free from the driving burdens and blessings of relentless sexuality. This more or less simultaneous wrestling with sex, faith and its lack, and the problem of theodicy (why God permits evil) is Singer's forte. Only Tolstoy does it better, but there is more real flesh in Singer, while the religious issues are at least as alive as those of Tolstoy's stellar episode toward the end of Anna Karenina, in which Levin successfully struggles toward theism. Singer's characters know what Tolstoy's don't: that 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians are gone who should not be gone. This novel is art, and monumental art; not another pleasure cruise for the beach umbrella.

Rating:
Summary: A failure of imagination
Review: This book was serialized in Yiddish in 1957 and 1958 in the pages of the socialist and extremely anti-Communist Jewish Daily Forward. Reading it reveals that it is no surprise that it took four decades for it to be translated into English. The book deals with a handful of New York Jews, almost all of them refuges from Nazism, in the immediate post-war period. Although most of them are in reasonably comfortable circumstances, they are almost all deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, some of which they survived, while others lost their loved ones. At the same time the characters worry about the equivalent tyranny of Stalin at the beginning of the Cold war (a point Singer constantly reiterates) and how some of their relatives are becoming (uniformly stupid) Communists themselves. Into this depressing situation comes the love affair between Anna Luria, daughter of the wealthy, devout businessman Boris Makaver, and Hertz Grein, a former scholar and now a successful stockbroker. Both of the couple are married, and Grein also has a hysterical mistress that he cannot get free of.

So far, so interesting. But I am afraid the book is a failure. I can understand why Singer would be deeply pessimistic about Judaism and the fate of the world. But the tone is one of hysteria, and however reasonable that might be as a response, it is not successful literature. The essential ideology portrayed is that only absolute devotion to the narrowest and most rigid Orthodoxy can save modern Jewry. The only alternatives presented are the aforementioned stupid Communists, and the most nihilistic sort of atheism. Over and over again various characters state that a Just God could not allow this sort of suffering to His people, and that it would be better if He did not exist at all. But then they usually conclude that atheism invariably leads to the nihilism of totalitarianism, and that therefore the most rigid Orthodoxy is the only solution. Now granted, these characters are not Singer himself. And there are signs that he undercuts his character's Orthodoxy. It will not escape the reader that as Anna's and Hertz's relationship collapses it is Hertz who bemoans and wails his lot. But it is actually Anna who goes out of her way to rescue her father from his own poor financial judgement even after he denounces her as a slut. Meanwhile Grein is horrified that his children are both marrying Gentiles, and disassociates himself from them. He shows no interest when his daughter-in-law thinks about converting to Judaism. "I don't accuse others, only myself," he claims, though in fact he has denounced his daughter as a whore for sleeping with her boyfriend. One might think that an adulterer, who repeatedly betrays the three women he is involved with, could care more for his own children. At another point Grein goes to a synagogue and he comments on how much more generous and kind the congregants are to him, in a way that Zionists and Communists wouldn't. Later, however, he complains that the congregation is as selfish and envious as everyone else. His idealization of the old Polish shetls is undercut by Dr. Margolin's reminder that he lost five siblings to infant mortality. As the book concludes Grein claims his loyalty to Orthodoxy is absolute, even though he doesn't really believe in Sinai, or much else.

So one could think that Grein is neurotic and a hypocrite. But the fact that his perspective, repeated by several other characters, is the one that is endlessly reiterated throughout the novel can help drown out one's reservations about his conduct. The only time Jews collectively show any dignity in the novel it is at religious functions or in the company of the Orthodox characters. Elsewhere, whether it is on vacation, or in business, or at political meetings, or in the world of show business the characters are shockingly crass. Another problem is the repetitive quality of the book, whether it is Grein's conversations about religion or his contacts with his mistress. The constant condemnations of pornography, of violent movies, of pro-female alimony laws are repeated without any real detail or nuance or illumination. Were it not for the criticism of Hitler and the occasional vegetarianism, much of it could have been repeated by Al-Qaedya. There is also an anti-feminism in the book, which only supports Grein's sexual bad faith ("a woman is not governed by reason but by emtions, instinct, fashion, or plain stubborness, against which rational arguments do not avail"). And portraying Grein as the slave of passion subtly blurs his responsibility for his sex life. Certainly the picture of America which emerges is extremely unflattering: assimilation at its worst. There is almost no attempt to deal with Gentiles. Not only is there the tactless reference to an Afrrican-American whose heart, says the book, is supposedly still in the jungle. But the characters immediately think the worst of the Germans they occasionally run into. Most of Singer's work tended to ignore Gentiles, but you cannot write a novel about the aftermath of the Holocaust which assumes that the vast majority of humanity consists only of shadows.

Rating:
Summary: A failure of imagination
Review: This book was serialized in Yiddish in 1957 and 1958 in the pages of the socialist and extremely anti-Communist Jewish Daily Forward. Reading it reveals that it is no surprise that it took four decades for it to be translated into English. The book deals with a handful of New York Jews, almost all of them refuges from Nazism, in the immediate post-war period. Although most of them are in reasonably comfortable circumstances, they are almost all deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, some of which they survived, while others lost their loved ones. At the same time the characters worry about the equivalent tyranny of Stalin at the beginning of the Cold war (a point Singer constantly reiterates) and how some of their relatives are becoming (uniformly stupid) Communists themselves. Into this depressing situation comes the love affair between Anna Luria, daughter of the wealthy, devout businessman Boris Makaver, and Hertz Grein, a former scholar and now a successful stockbroker. Both of the couple are married, and Grein also has a hysterical mistress that he cannot get free of.

So far, so interesting. But I am afraid the book is a failure. I can understand why Singer would be deeply pessimistic about Judaism and the fate of the world. But the tone is one of hysteria, and however reasonable that might be as a response, it is not successful literature. The essential ideology portrayed is that only absolute devotion to the narrowest and most rigid Orthodoxy can save modern Jewry. The only alternatives presented are the aforementioned stupid Communists, and the most nihilistic sort of atheism. Over and over again various characters state that a Just God could not allow this sort of suffering to His people, and that it would be better if He did not exist at all. But then they usually conclude that atheism invariably leads to the nihilism of totalitarianism, and that therefore the most rigid Orthodoxy is the only solution. Now granted, these characters are not Singer himself. And there are signs that he undercuts his character's Orthodoxy. It will not escape the reader that as Anna's and Hertz's relationship collapses it is Hertz who bemoans and wails his lot. But it is actually Anna who goes out of her way to rescue her father from his own poor financial judgement even after he denounces her as a slut. Meanwhile Grein is horrified that his children are both marrying Gentiles, and disassociates himself from them. He shows no interest when his daughter-in-law thinks about converting to Judaism. "I don't accuse others, only myself," he claims, though in fact he has denounced his daughter as a whore for sleeping with her boyfriend. One might think that an adulterer, who repeatedly betrays the three women he is involved with, could care more for his own children. At another point Grein goes to a synagogue and he comments on how much more generous and kind the congregants are to him, in a way that Zionists and Communists wouldn't. Later, however, he complains that the congregation is as selfish and envious as everyone else. His idealization of the old Polish shetls is undercut by Dr. Margolin's reminder that he lost five siblings to infant mortality. As the book concludes Grein claims his loyalty to Orthodoxy is absolute, even though he doesn't really believe in Sinai, or much else.

So one could think that Grein is neurotic and a hypocrite. But the fact that his perspective, repeated by several other characters, is the one that is endlessly reiterated throughout the novel can help drown out one's reservations about his conduct. The only time Jews collectively show any dignity in the novel it is at religious functions or in the company of the Orthodox characters. Elsewhere, whether it is on vacation, or in business, or at political meetings, or in the world of show business the characters are shockingly crass. Another problem is the repetitive quality of the book, whether it is Grein's conversations about religion or his contacts with his mistress. The constant condemnations of pornography, of violent movies, of pro-female alimony laws are repeated without any real detail or nuance or illumination. Were it not for the criticism of Hitler and the occasional vegetarianism, much of it could have been repeated by Al-Qaedya. There is also an anti-feminism in the book, which only supports Grein's sexual bad faith ("a woman is not governed by reason but by emtions, instinct, fashion, or plain stubborness, against which rational arguments do not avail"). And portraying Grein as the slave of passion subtly blurs his responsibility for his sex life. Certainly the picture of America which emerges is extremely unflattering: assimilation at its worst. There is almost no attempt to deal with Gentiles. Not only is there the tactless reference to an Afrrican-American whose heart, says the book, is supposedly still in the jungle. But the characters immediately think the worst of the Germans they occasionally run into. Most of Singer's work tended to ignore Gentiles, but you cannot write a novel about the aftermath of the Holocaust which assumes that the vast majority of humanity consists only of shadows.

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Work
Review: This is a long, deep novel that deals with some of the fundamental problems of human existence. More than any other writer, Singer (at least in this book) reminds me of Dostoyevsky, whose characters were constantly in existentialist turmoil over questions such as good vs. evil and whether or not there is a God (and if there is, is He good, evil or indifferent?) Of course, while Dostoyevsky was a Christian, all of the characters in Shadows on the Hudson are Jewish holocaust survivors who have recently emigrated to New York from Europe shortly after World War ll. This is something that none of them can forget, even for a day, as many barely escaped while their loved ones perished. Beyond this confrontation with evil and death, the novel is largely about the philosophical war between religious orthodoxy and hedonistic modern life. Contemporary readers who do not come from a strongly religious background may have some difficulty appreciating this dilemma. The mass culture that Singer found vulgar and amoral in the 50s has now all but taken over in America, leaving many people no frame of reference for any other type of existence. While there is much philosophizing, Singer succeeds in creating flesh and blood characters whose moral anguish is not simply abstract, but put to the test in daily life. The character we spend the most time with is Hertz Grein, a middle-aged man whose religious yearnings are in stark contrast to his lifestyle. He is a married man who has had a long affair with another woman. As the novel opens, he is preparing to run off with yet another woman. Grein's behavior through most of this book is both irrational and indefensible. He lies to all three women, and makes all his decisions on the whim of the moment. At the same time, he is hardly without a conscience. On the contrary, he is deeply ashamed of the pain he causes others and desperately wants to redeem himself. Reading Shadows on the Hudson, I got the feeling that Singer himself, as he wrote the book, was struggling with the very issues faced by Grein and his other, equally fascinating and conflicted characters. The central problem posed by the book is the paradox of faith. On the one hand, there is no evidence that God exists. Indeed, the prevalence of suffering and evil suggests an indifferent universe. On the other hand, life without faith is unbearable and leads to a world without meaning or values. Does this mean that we should, even in the absence of evidence, embrace a strict moral code? Although the conclusion of Shadows on the Hudson is somewhat ambiguous, Singer seems to answer this question tentatively in the affirmative. Whether or not you agree (I actually don't), the question is an extremely important one and this book gets to the core of it.

Rating:
Summary: A story of the people who came to America in world war 2
Review: This is not an easy reading book, is interesting in some parts and very boring in others, some part of the story could be real and some parts nobody will believe it, I think that in general is a heavy book, to read it you will have to have patient, I don't recommend this book for a plane or places that you want to read to be entertained with something like waiting rooms, etc.

Rating:
Summary: An exploration of post-war American Jewish life
Review: This novel is long and repetitive. It originially appeared serialized in the Forward. In its unedited state, it seems that Singer felt the need to continuously remind the readers of the action from previous weeks. Character development is shallow, although Singer's ability to sketch character is masterful. Despite these problems, one must remember that this is SINGER writing, and even a lesser work by this genius is worth reading. Shadows is an important novel that details the hurtling inner lives of American Jews in the years just after the Holocaust. Singers prescient understanding of the wonders of Jewish resilience on one the hand, and the degradation of their souls on the other, is astonishing. It is as if Singer had a crystal ball to presage Jewish life today. For those students of this subject, this book is required reading. However, the general audience is likely to find the novel tiresome.