Enemies, A Love Story

Enemies, A Love Story (Yiddish: Sonim, di geshikhte fun a libe) is a tragicomedy novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer first published serially in the Jewish Daily Forward on February 11, 1966.

He brought her to Brooklyn, and in their apartment in Coney Island, she works diligently as a homemaker, learning how to cook Ashkenazi Jewish foods as matzo balls with borscht, carp's head, and challah, but although there are moments of tenderness between them, it isn't a happy union.

He has told her that he works as a book salesman and that he has to travel for his job up and down the Eastern seaboard, but in fact he works as a ghost-writer for a corrupt rabbi in Manhattan named Milton Lampert and the nights that Yadwiga thinks he's on the road, he is in fact spending in the Bronx in a second apartment he secretly rents for his mistress, Masha, a severely traumatized Holocaust survivor, and her mother, a pious woman named Shifrah Puah.

This romantic arrangement becomes even more complicated when Herman reads his name in a classified ad in a Yiddish newspaper, answers it, and learns that Tamara also survived the Holocaust and is in New York City.

The New York Times wrote that "Singer's marvelously pointed humor has turned black and bitter, the sex is flat, and there is little irony or selfconsciousness," and condemned Enemies as "a bleak, obsessive novel that offers neither release nor hope.