Shadows on the Hudson
A Novel
Isaac Bashevis Singer
From the Upper West Side to Miami's pastel resorts, Shadows on the Hudson traces the intertwined destiny of survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
"A piercing work of fiction with a strong claim to being Singer's masterpiece" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times), Shadows on the Hudson traces the intertwined lives of a group of Jewish refugees in New York City in the late 1940s. At its center is Boris Makaver, a pious, wealthy businessman whose greatest trial is his unstable daughter, Anna. A chain of events disrupts the lives of the close-knit community as each refugee struggles to reconcile the horrific past with the difficult present, as Singer explores both the nature of faith and the nature of love in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
“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
About the Author
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Yiddish-language novelist and storyteller who chronicled Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America with humor, mysticism, and moral depth. Born in Poland to a rabbinic family, he emigrated to New York in 1935 and wrote for the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) for decades. His novels, memoirs, and short stories give voice to the shtetl, the Hasidic court, and the world lost to the Holocaust. His characters, whether rabbis, skeptics, dybbuks, or ordinary people wrestling with faith and desire, embody the tensions between tradition and modernity at the heart of Jewish experience.
Singer received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” He won two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974) and Newbery Honors in 1968 and 1969. His Jewish literary honors include the Louis Lamed Prize (1950 and 1956) and Israel’s S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal (1975). The Jewish Book Council selected his novel The Slave for its Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award, the council’s top prize for English-language fiction of Jewish interest, in recognition of 1962 publications. A master of the short story, he is remembered for classics such as “Gimpel the Fool,” translated into English by Saul Bellow.