I recently finished Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shosha. Singer has been on my list for a long time, and I happened upon a copy of Shosha at my favorite Knoxville used book emporium, McKay’s. (If you’re one of those rare Knoxvillians who hasn’t discovered McKay’s, do it soon. It’s awesome, though I have to admit I miss their old location on Kingston Pike, cramped and claustrophobic as it often was.)
In short, Shosha blew me away. From the first page, I just kept going, pulled in by Singer’s narrative expertise and this story of Tsutsik, a Polish Jew, making his way through the first half of the 20th century. Particularly effective were the descriptions of Warsaw’s Jews nervously awaiting Hitler’s impending Holocaust in the ’30s and Tsutsik’s love of the childlike Shosha. I can’t speak much to Singer’s style, since he wrote in Yiddish and I’m not sure about the quality of this translation, but his storytelling is superb.
In one of my favorite passages, the professorial Feitelzohn holds court: “World history is made of the same dough as bagels. It must be fresh. This is why democracy and capitalism are going down the drain. They have become stale. This is the reason idolatry was so exciting. You could buy a new god every year. We Jews burdened the nations with an eternal God, and therefore they hate us.”
Singer’s portrayal of the Warsaw ghetto’s Krochmalna Street is particularly vivid. The mix of Hassidic rabbis, prostitutes, scammers and the destitute leaps of the page. And the beauty of the book is that hope and innocence prevail, even in the shadow of horrendous events. Shosha keeps Tsutsik rooted.
