Shosha

Shosha, was originally published in English in 1978, after having been published in serialized form in 1974 in the Yiddish language publication Jewish Daily Forward. In Shosha, Singer brings us back into the Jewish community in Warsaw in the mid-1930s. The community is fractured into Bundists (the Jewish Socialist Labor Movement), Communists, Zionists, assimilationists, and, of course, traditional religious Jews and Hasids intent on sticking to the old ways. But everyone can discern the growing twin shadows of Hitler and Stalin. These people are expecting a Nazi invasion and know what their fate is likely to be. Our narrator is Aaron Griedinger, known to his friends as Tsutsik, a young struggling writer trying to find his way amid these show more philosophies and his possible futures. There are several women in Tsutsik's life, each, perhaps (or so it seemed to me, at any rate) representing a possible route for him. Celia, somewhat older and married, is assimilated and, along with her husband, more than a little hedonist. Dora, Tsutsik's on again, off again lover, is a Communist, preparing to leave for Soviet Russia until one of her former comrades comes staggering back from that country with tales of the arrests, torture, banishment and even executions awaiting Polish Jews who, professed Communists though they may be, cross the border hoping to join the workers' paradise. Betty Slonim is an American/Jewish actress who comes to Warsaw with her rich lover, Sam Dreiman. Sam and Betty represent a way out. They want Tsutsik to write a play for Betty and come with them to America, where Sam will produce it. But, almost by chance, Tsutsik returns one day to the old Jewish neighborhood of his youth, reconnects with a childhood friend, Shosha, and is immediately smitten. On the surface naive and trusting, her physical growth stunted by long years of malnutrition, Shosha, as Tsutsik soon comes to know, and for all her innocence, understands much more of the world than she lets on. Tsutsik knows he will never leave her again, though a union with Shosha most likely means death, for she will never leave Warsaw, and her mother, and the Nazis won't hold off their invasion forever.

Throughout this novel we receive Singer's deft, often humorous, touch describing human nature. In addition, the neighborhoods and streets of 1930s Warsaw and of Jewish life there (Singer himself grew up in Warsaw and left in the '30s, the lucky recipient of an extremely rare (for Jews at that time) U.S. visa) is delightfully and lovingly rendered, as the Jews of Warsaw continue their daily lives with the shadow of calamity. In addition to narrative beauty, humor, and the strength of Singer's character portrayals is the tension surrounding the fates of each of Tsutsik's friends. Who will stay and who will go. And for those who chose to stay, why are they staying? And of course in the center of it all there is Tsutsik and Shosha, and the drama of their fates. I found the last 50 or 75 pages of Shosha to be among the most moving and memorable of anything I've read by Singer. That, for me, is saying a lot.

Weaved throughout this narrative are many wonderful conversations about philosophy, religion and fate. One of Tsutsik's friends says to him, as they sit over coffee, "I remember your words. 'The world is a slaughterhouse and a brothel.' . . . Still, everything is forced upon us, even hope. The dictator on high, the celestial Stalin, says, 'You must hope!' And if he says you must, you hope. But what can I hope for any more? Only for death. Where is the sugar?" show less

Some months back, I relocated an antique bookcase long ago constructed from the headboard of some ancient bed to a wall in our bedroom just opposite my own pillow. It is packed full with scores of mass market paperbacks, a now mostly obsolete format that once thrived as a means to put both great literature and pulp into the hands of a wider population in inexpensive, portable editions. So it was that I went to sleep each night staring at my own eclectic array of mass markets – classics, literature, sci-fi and, yes, some pulp – collected almost entirely during my teen years. This is how it was that I came to read Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer, randomly plucked from that shelf between yawns one evening.
Singer, who was born in show more Warsaw when it was a part of Russia (Poland ceased to be a nation during its long partition from 1795-1918), left Europe on the eve of the rise of Hitler and spent most of his long life in the United States, where he established a reputation in the Yiddish literary movement based upon his themes of Jewish mysticism, morality, philosophy and vegetarianism that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize. Like much of his work, Shosha was originally written in Yiddish.
Shosha is an odd book, by any measure. Written later in life when Singer was in his seventies, the perhaps semi-autobiographical novel looks back through the eyes of its protagonist, fledgling writer Aaron Greidinger, at the Jewish ghetto of his childhood in one corner of the Russian empire where he befriends the eponymous Shosha, as well as the independent Poland of his young manhood defined by the ever-widening shadow of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. When Aaron – known by the affectionate nickname Tsutsik – is reunited with Shosha many years later he is a young man on the make, struggling to earn a living as a writer, moving in literary circles where conversations frequently turn to Spinoza, Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as the orthodox rabbinical tradition he has largely abandoned. Tsutsik, who lives on the margins barely scraping by, nevertheless has one Dickensian event of good fortune after another. Rich men want to sponsor him. Almost every woman wants to bed him – and he eagerly obliges them. Shosha, on the other hand, in the intervening years has endured some kind of catastrophic malady termed a “sleeping sickness” that has left her short and stunted with a body barely developed beyond that of a child. In fact, she is frequently mistaken for a child. She also seems to be at least mildly mentally retarded. Nevertheless, when Tsutsik finds her again, he immediately commences an obsessive love affair with Shosha that is incomprehensible to everyone he knows. And, I might add, to the reader, as well.
I assumed the timeless innocence of the character Shosha to be a an allegory to the lost world of the Warsaw of Tsutsik’s – and Singer’s – childhood, before the Great War, and perhaps a symbol of the fragility of the reborn yet hardly mature new nation of Poland, doomed to fall once more before the onslaught of Nazi tanks. But there is clearly more to it than that as Tsutsik’s romantic love for Shosha deepens and they become betrothed. While Shosha is biologically a grown woman, there remains something creepily Lolita-like about her as an object of sexual lust, especially as it is repeatedly made clear in the narrative that others perceive her as the child she appears to be. My discomfort grew exponentially in the graphic description of the wedding night scene, replete with bloody sheets, in which Tsutsik effectively rapes the terrified, resisting Shosha. This sense of violation is further exacerbated a few pages later, when a peevish Shosha confesses that she wants more of that marriage bed, as soon as possible. Perhaps I am more sensitive than I used to be, but none of this sat well with me at all. In fact, I could not shake a sense of disgust at being forced to serve as audience to a kind of literary voyeuristic pedophilia that was at best gratuitous, at worst repulsive.
Through all of this, I anticipated some sort of dramatic denouement, which was not to be. Suddenly, and without explanation, the narrative ends. It then picks up again in a disjointed “Epilogue” that finds Tsutsik thirteen years later, an established New York author visiting the new nation of Israel, which serves as an uneven vehicle for relating the fate of all of the significant characters from the novel: “anticlimactic” does not even begin to describe it.
I have never read Singer before, nor have I read other works from his Yiddish literary tradition, so I am possibly not qualified to properly judge the merit of this novel. It is clear that Singer was an extremely gifted writer working within a highly-developed intellectual milieu. Portions of the narrative devoted to existential explorations of philosophy, religion, politics and morality are well worth the read. Still, the episodes with the girl-child Shosha that come to dominate the book are deeply disturbing, whatever the author’s intent. If Shosha is indeed a metaphor for innocence, we cannot help but cringe at her defilement by the novelist as protagonist. Would I ever read Singer again? I can’t say. Would I recommend Shosha to others? Not so much. show less

I have read a number of Singer’s novels and many of his short stories and I have enjoyed some of each. But writers as prolific as Singer always offer something new to discover. Well, I’ve discovered it and, at least in this instance, I don’t care for it. The story is a thinly veiled framework for Singer’s philosophical musings. Singer expends little effort on plot, relying instead upon history to host his characters’ often prosaic reflections. Although some authors choose not to give their minor characters much depth, most authors will spend time and effort to provide (at the very least) enough information about their major characters so that a reader can identify with or at least understand those characters’ beliefs and show more actions. Not here. Aaron Greidinger is the axis on which this novel turns; he is raised as a devout Jew in post-World War I Warsaw. His childhood playmate, Shosha, is from a far more assimilated family and although she is an exceptionally unsophisticated and naïve child, the two spend much of their free time together (although given his family, that can’t be much). Inevitably their paths diverge and Aaron abandons his upbringing. Singer leaves this significant decision wholly unexplained until Aaron mentions much much later that he lost his faith, though how or why is again ignored. Aaron doesn’t see Shosha for twenty years and then, upon merely doing so, is unaccountably smitten. Is it a longing for his past, is it a passion for her, or is it something entirely else? Yet again, Singer doesn’t bother to discuss the matter. He does, however, spend many pages discussing “Philosophy”: Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche are all named and invoked often. Indeed, a character who appears just twice in the entire book is given seven pages to ruminate on “deep” questions. Meanwhile, Hitler’s power grows and suddenly Aaron is given a life-changing choice: flee to America and become wealthy with a millionaire’s backing (an offer that also requires Aaron to marry the millionaire’s mistress) or stay in Warsaw with Shosha. Two pages later, again with no discussion or explanation, Aaron decides. Singer devotes much of his narrative to Aaron’s involvement with the millionaire and his mistress and to Aaron’s time spent with Shosha. We learn what Aaron’s decision is but not Shosha’s destiny until the Epilogue when Singer tells us how the war affected everyone’s lives. Leon Wieseltier described Shosha as “a stunted novel about stunted lives.” Every character seemed more than ordinarily flawed. Add Singer’s refusal to explain his characters or their behavior and we’re left with a novel whose message lies elsewhere. Human inability to comprehend God’s actions (or inaction) leads inescapably to the last scene in the book. (SPOILER)Aaron and a friend who have both survived the war, sit unspeaking in an apartment in Israel. When asked why they don’t turn on a light, the answer is perhaps just a trifle too precious: "We’re waiting for an answer."(/SPOILER) Whether it will satisfy you depends, I suspect, on your tolerance for everything that has preceded it. show less

Shosha is set in pre-war Poland and tells the tale of an aspiring young writer, Aaron Greidlinger and his women.

When one of his lovers describes him as as “a godless lecher and a fanatical Jew” most female readers will have to agree. Like Herman Broder in Enemies, A Love Story, women flock to young Greidlinger. As with Broder and Greidlinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer charms his readers - what’s not to like? And though the story is simple, the only problem I had with the book, was in keeping track of the Greidlinger’s different lovers. The book held my attention throughout. This is partly due to its underlying structure.

Sosha was first published in serialised form for the New York Jewish Daily Forward. With serials the writer to show more needs to ensure that the reader will want to read the next segment. This makes the book an easy read.

Shosha is Greidliner’s first love, and like Broder’s first lover in Enemies, the gentile Yadwiga , she’s as innocent as the driven snow. There’s a difference between the two women. Shosha is Jewish and gentle and the love of Greidlinger’s life. He is devoted to Shosha and her gentle innocence, whereas Broder is tied to the gentile Yadwiga from a sense of moral duty.

I enjoyed the different characters and Singer’s way of evoking Jewish ghetto life in pre-war Warsaw. The interest of Shosha is in the characters and their philosophical and political ideas. Some reviewers have criticized the book for having no proper ending. Loose ends are not tidied up. Instead Greidlinger ups and exits.

“We are running away and Mount Sinai runs after us”, Greidlinger says, and leaves alone for New York. End of story.

I highly recommend this book. I am utterly under the spell of the writer and his characters. show less

To me, Shosha is a book about a culture lost, about the vibrant and diverse, and very much alive community of Polish Jews in the interwar period. Singer describes with emotion, but also cynicism and criticism, the different aspects of that life, which the war wiped out forever. But as always with SInger, this is also very much a book about love, and it's not necessary the love between Shosha and the protagonist, but more about the man's need for a love and a desire for the simple. The young writer goes back to the slow and immature girl who was his companion of childhood, his first listener who appreciate every word. The book presents a love that is completely unconventional, but one that has so many unexpected aspects and faces.

I was drawn to this book by its setting, in the pre-war Jewish community in Warsaw. However it doesn't set out to explore this setting but rather to use it in much the same way a play will use stage props. It does give some insights but they are almost incidental. Instead we get a cleverly contrived but constantly shifting view of one young man and his immediate circle. One of the characters claims that the modern Jew is interested only in sex, the Torah and revolution mixed together: this in a way summarises the book. Aaron Greidinger, the son of a Hassidic rabbi, emerges from his Hassidic upbringing steeped in the culture but without its substance of faith. His attempt to find a way through his life involves an unconvincing attempt to show more embrace intellectual post modernism whilst being seduced by women representing these various tensions. His final clinging to Shosha, innocence and naivety, seems like finding his feet in fleeting contact with solid ground in the middle of a quicksand. But in the end, the destructive force represented by the Nazi holocaust is mainly one of cleansing from delusion and laying bare the difficulty of simply clinging on to what meaning life gives you. 28 November 2017. show less

Much enjoyed Shosha: funny, deep, moving. Smorgasbord of characters in Arty-bohemian Poland as Hitler threatens. Slightly fuzzy ending though.