One good (but unfortunate) way of accumulating a pile of books to read is to break your ankle. In no time after my injury I found myself awash in reading material, all kinds of reading material. This was welcome, because when your mobility is seriously compromised, reading is an excellent option.

My friend Vox brought over an eclectic pile of books. This included a curious history book called The Meaning of Everything, all about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. I confess I liked the idea of this book better than the actual book, and I abandoned this one after being thoroughly convinced of just how huge a task it was to create this dictionary.

The next one I picked up from the Vox stack was Enemies: A Love Story, the 1972 novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. This novel revolves around Herman Broder, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and refugee, living in New York.

During the war, Herman escaped the Nazis by hiding in a hayloft, with the help of a peasant girl named Yadwiga, who had been a servant to Herman’s wealthy family. Herman, believing his wife Tamara and their two children had been shot and killed by the Nazis, married Yadwiga and brought her to America, where they settled in Coney Island. When we meet Herman, he has a mistress as well, a woman living in The Bronx named Masha, who he fell in love with back in Europe. Herman tells Yadwiga he is an encyclopedia salesman who has to go on book-selling trips – which are in fact visits to Masha. Herman is not a book-seller, but actually a ghost-writer of religious material for an entrepreneurial rabbi, this even though Herman has abandoned his faith. Along the way we find out that while Herman’s children were indeed killed by the Nazis, Tamara was shot but survived. Inevitably, she shows up in America and finds Herman. Herman’s life is a tangled knot.

Herman lives impossible layers of lies, and though he is constantly worried he will be found out, he continues to concoct new ones. Of course all three women learn the score along the way.

There is a strange tension in this novel between the absurd love quadrangle and the haunting shadow of past horrors that cannot be separated from the lives of the characters involved, as they adapt to life in America. What an engaging and unusual read. Recommended.