Even if I married a whole harem of women I’d still act like a bachelor

Elaine Showalter

• Shadows on the Hudson by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Joseph Sherman
  Hamish Hamilton, 560 pp, £16.99, June 1998, ISBN 0 241 13940 6
• Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life by Janice Hadda
  Oxford, 254 pp, £22.50, February 1998, ISBN 0 19 508420 9

The posthumous English publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel, originally serialised in 1957-58 in the New York Yiddish newspaper the Forward; and about the reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime. It has been compared to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also condemned as a melodramatic mishmash. First, Richard Bernstein (last December in the New York Times) called it ‘a startling, piercing work of fiction with a strong claim to being Singer’s masterpiece’. Bernstein kvelled about its ‘largeness, the depth and complexity of its exorbitantly vivid, intelligent characters’ and Singer’s ‘skill in weaving into a seamless tapestry various disorderly responses to the savagery of life’. But then another New York Times reviewer, Lee Siegel, called it a ‘chaotic, rambling, repetitive and parochial’ book in a ‘plodding translation’ – a ‘shapeless lump’ compared to Singer’s best stories, which are ‘hard diamonds of perfection’.