Shadows on the Hudson - ISBNLookup.com

From the Publisher

"A significant event, a major addition to the English-language Singer oeuvre. It is a startling, piercing work of fiction, a book with a strong claim to being Singer's masterpiece."—The New York Times "A matchless portrait of human frailty seen from the perspective of a vast compassionate understanding. A major work, from one of the great modern novelists."—Kirkus Reviews "This major novel is a welcome addition to the Singer library."—Library Journal

Library Journal

Originally published serially in Yiddish in The Forward, this novel by Nobel Prize Laureate Singer relates the lives of Jewish refugees in New York City just after World War II. Wealthy and religious Boris Makaver is challenged by the scandal created when his daughter Anna abandons her second husband, an unemployed lawyer, for a friend of the family, Grein. The latter is torn by his inability to resist the romantic demands of three women (his wife, his long-time mistress, and Anna) and his attempts to return to the religious faith of his father. The lingering effects of the losses in the Holocaust and the influence of communism and godlessness combine with staged seances and the reappearance of Anna's unsavory first husband to provide much spiritual searching. This major novel is a welcome addition to the Singer library. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/97.]Ann Irvine, Silver Spring Lib., Md.

Alfred Kazin

In the Fifties the Forward serialized Shadows on the Hudson, a bitter novel about New York in the late Forties which has now finally appeared in English. It is repetitious in its serial form, and gives the impression that writing it must have been disturbing for Singer. I do not know why he left the Yiddish text in the files of the Forward before he died in 1991, but I suspect that he did not want his doting American public to know just how meaningless he found life in America.— The New York Review of Books