Shosha is a novel originally written in Yiddish by Nobel Prize winning author

Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is about the aspiring author Aaron Greidinger who
lives in the Hasidic quarter of the Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw during the
1930s.

"I was an anachronism in every way, but I didn't know it, just as I didn't know
that my friendship with Shosha [..] had anything to do with love."

Aaron had many love affairs with women, but the only woman he truly loved
was Shosha, his childhood friend. Shosha was struck by a sleeping disease
and had since barely grown physically and was mentally retarded. Aaron lived
his childhood on 10 Krochmalna Street, and lost the sight of her as he moved
away and she moved from no. 10 to no. 7.

Hitler is in power in Germany and is set to annihilate the Jews in Poland while
in Russia, Stalin rules with his deadly terror, so the only voluntary exit that
many of the characters in Shosha perceive for themselves is suicide.
Although Aaron is offered the opportunity to leave the threat of death as
others, from Hassidics to Hedonists, do he turns down the chance to
escape, for his love for Shosha and chooses to stay in Poland. Death is the
cloud that hangs over the characters in Shosha. As writer whose main
medium is language, the book opens by explaining that Aaron was brought
up on three dead languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish.
Epilogue
The epilogue of Shosha is an abrupt fast-forward from before the outbreak of
the Second World War in Poland to the early fifties. In the last chapter the
story ends thirteen years later, when Aaron meets Haiml Chentshiner in
Israel. The epilogue is a concise dialogue in which each recounts the death of
their friends.
Characters

Tsutsik, is Aaron Griedinger's nickname. Literally it means a little

yapping puppy. In Yiddish this word, as well as some other words
normally considered pejorative may be turned into endearments.

Shosha, daughter of the neighbors Bashele and Zelig.

Teibele, Shosha's sister.

Dora, Aaron's main lover at the beginning, who supposedly left Poland
for Russia, only to be found still in Poland later in the book.
Moishe, Aaron's brother and rabbi.

Betty Slonim, American actress who is the mistress of Sam Dreimann

an American millionaire, her sugar-daddy; she also sleeps with Aaron.

Sam Dreimann, an American millionaire, totally blinded by love for

Betty.

Morris Feitelzohn, friend and hedonist philosopher. A dilettante who is

enslaved by his determination to be free.

Haiml, husband of
unsatisfying lover.

Celia Chentshiner, wife of a friend and adulterous lover of Aaron and

Feitelzohn. She is physically dissatisfied by her husband and has an
overactive libido. She is a purported atheist who still dresses modestly
with long sleeves and high collars, that betray her Hassidic upbringing.

Tekla, non-Jewish maid at Aaron's apartment.

Celia;

an

immature,

overgrown

child

and

"Shosha" is the story of a young writer's unswervering devotion to a

childhood sweetheart, the backward Shosha, whom the protagonist knew
at age 7 or so and to whom years later he returns for marriage. The main
body of "Shosha" is sandwiched awkwardly between a resonant opening
set in those childhood years and a Victorian epilogue after the writer's
emigration from Poland to America. Autobiographical in nature, it is a
record of Jewish ghetto life in Poland in the 1930s, on the eve of the
Holocaust. It is also a chronicle of the swarming literary-political life in
Warsaw, with pagan Communism battling Torah laws in young Jewish
minds. And, of course, it is the story of the life and times of one Aaron
Greidinger, the young journalist and budding novelist, rabbi's son and
skeptic, Yiddishist and womanizer--a portrait perhaps of the artist as a
young Singer. And at the very end, in the epilogue that seeks to tie up all
the loose Polish ends in modern Israel, it is a kind of elegy for the dead, a
remembrance of destruction and of friends killed. At its best "Shosha"
contains charming scenes, moving movements, flares of chaos.
The most lively character here is the philosopher academician Dr. Morris
Feitelzohn, the author of "Spiritual Hormones" and a "skirt-chaser" of the

first order. A charming monomaniac and earthy mystic, Dr. Feitelzohn is a

bristling bundle of contradiction, and one wishes for more of him. His
sense of humor crackles with impiety: "I love the Jews even though I
cannot stand them. No evolution could have created them. For me they
are the only proof of God's existence." On a lighter note, there is Sam
Dreiman, the American construction millionaire, in Warsaw to promote his
mistress, the actress Betty Slonim. Vulgar operator par excellence,
Dreiman is a finely satirized type, effective and amusing. But most of the
characters are females, who fall over one another in their adoration of
young Greidinger. There is Mrs. Celia Chentshiner, a "hot-blooded" exHasid in her 30's whose passions are literature and Aaron. ("I like
gentleness," she explains to him, "but not in bed.") Dora Stolnitz is a
short, huge-bosomed Stalinist who lectures the young writer on his failing
capitalist degeneracy and then rolls in bed with him humorously. ("We
indulged in some foreplay, some during-play, and sometimes even some
afterplay.") There is Tekla, the fair-haired Polish peasant maid, who serves
him in every way. Betty Slonim is the somewhat sophisticated actress who
has been a failure on the New York Jewish stage. She wants to act in
Aaron's play, falls madly in love with him and offers him a convenient
marriage with the financial blessings of sugar-daddy Dreiman. Finally,
there is Shosha herself, backward since childhood, who grows neither in
mind nor body, but whom the protagonist chooses anyway for his bride.
All told, as one can readily see, the young writer is a lucky--or unlucky,
depending--man, with a vision of heaven that includes a harem on earth.
Singer's narcissism here is sweet, old-world, innocuous, courtly.
Besides amusing character, there is a convincing setting, Warsaw, 1930's.
The Warsaw scenes are drawn with a knowledge of place and atmosphere
lacking in Singer's recent ventures into the American scene, and they hark
back to his finer work, as in the memoir "In My Father's Court." Here the
hectic street life of the Polish ghetto, with neighborhood interplay of
Jewish gangsters and prostitutes mingling, with Hasidic families and
workers, is effectively done. The aroma from potato knishes and chickpeas
with beans is real. His sense of comaraderie in the impoverished rooms
where dreams of Zionism and socialism are hatched, or in the writer's club
over a game of chess and a glass of tea, where writers' talents are
assessed and reputations assassinated, all this is sure. From Singer's
Krochmalna Street to my own Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn, or the old East
Side, is hardly a distance; though thousands of miles apart, they are
adjacent neighborhoods. While one gets snatches of Yiddish cadence in
the dialogue, I miss more the sound of Yiddish words in the overpurified
translation. But the characters' names have the spell of Yiddish: Tsutsik for
Aaron, Haiml Chentshiner, Zelig and Bashele, Yppe and Teibele. There is
much dialogue here. When the talk involves the adventures of everyday

life it is alive with humor and irony; when it travels to the upper airs of
metaphysics and occultism--the existence of God, good and evil, the
transmigration of souls--it is solemnly uneventful. Singer's Warsaw scenes
are resonant with a felt reality and capture poignantly a real, if provincial,
culture. When it comes to transforming shtetl life into serious art,
however, Singer does not have the wit of Sholem Aleichem or the force of
Babel. As for portraying a Jewish community on the eve of its
destructions--which "Shosha" does, despite the author's disclaimer--the
Israeli writer Aaron Appelfeld is a subtler observer.
A crucial theme in this novel, one that was dramatized superbly in Singer's
wonderful short story "Gimpel the Fool," concerns innocence that borders
on saintliness, which, in its childlike acceptance of all things in this world,
will defeat evil and achieve redemption. It is embodied here in the fixture
of Shosha herself, a girl of 9 who speaks like a child of 6 when we first
meet her, who is left back in school two years and is considered "a little
fool" and who never does grow up as she gets older. The early scenes, in
which the immature Shosha puts all her innocent faith in the precocious
rabbi's boy, are filled with a fine evocation of childhood, where the world
is a big uncharted territory and intimacy the only guide. As a caterpillar
crawling about there, protected by Aaron, Shosha is alive with the
questions and delights of a child. But as the butterfly who is Aaron's
betrothed and wife, Shosha is overly predictable, uninspiring. And Aaron
Greidinger fails to probe into his complicated motives for returning to
Shosha, stopping at surface explanations to himself and others. Shosha is
killed off summarily in the epilogue, never allowed a sufficient test of her
saintliness against the reality of married life and hard times--unlike
Gimpel, the saintly baker, who perseveres to test his belief in a higher
truth and beautify despite worldly contradictions.
A problem in "Shosha," as elsewhere in Singer, is his failure to confront
fully a difficult dilemma. Late in the novel, Betty Slonim admonishes the
hero, "You're both a godless lecher and a fanatical Jew--as bigoted as my
great-grandfather! How is it possible?" And Aaron Greidinger replies, "We
are running away and Mount Sinai runs after us. This chase has made us
sick and mad." But the hero here does not become sick and mad--though
he has bouts with sickness and madness-as perhaps his temperament and
circumstances dictate. Instead, the author permits him to exit quietly from
Poland and eventually take up life anew in America, while an external
madness (Nazism) has obliterated the other characters. The way out for
Singer is the dream, the fantasy, the mythic, not the real. The
predicament is not examined with the seriousness he proposes. Singer is
best when he offers us childlike dreams of innocence and salvation
("Gimpel"), parables of erotic/religious torment ("The Magician of Lublin")

or historical recreations of false wonder and miracle ("Satan in Goray").

"What are writers?" Aaron Greidinger wonders aloud. "The same kind of
entertainers as magicians." And while Feitelzohn immediately disputes
that, saying Aaron is a serious young man, there is much truth in the
hero's assessment, so far as his creator is concerned. Singer's aim is to
entertain, and by this standard he fully succeeds in "Shosha."

The male characters in Shosha seem to exist as exemplars of modern

Jewish existential choices. One is a great exponent of matters new age
and spiritual; another, of life as a game; one, of money above all; one, of
the virtues of family and friends; one, of traditional chasidic life; one, of
Stalinist communism.

And then there are the women.

Though the novel is named for Shosha, its no more about this title
character than any Singer novel can ever be fully about a female. Singers
women are lovingly drawn, but often seem to exist only in the presence of
a single male protagonist. Their lives stop the moment he leaves the
room. They freeze mid-sentence, to be animated again, in this case, only
when Aarons attentions return. Their off-camera lives are sketchy, at
best.In Shosha, theres Dora, the ardent Stalinist, by the end suicidally
disillusioned; Tekla, the Polish peasant servant, so spoiled by cosmopolitan
Jews that she rejects her own drunken soldier fianc; Celia, the middleaged lapsed chasid, half maternal, half voracious libido; Betty, the aging
Americanized Yiddish actress, bought mistress of the generous American
Sam Dreiman, wholl do anything, risk any amount of embarrassment and
strained marital arrangements, to get Aaron out of Warsaw.

Shosha herself is clearly not an adult woman. Like Oskar, in that most
crucial of postwar German novels, Gunter Grasss The Tin Drum, Shosha
has remained childlike in stature and appearance. Has she, like Oskar,
refused to grow because she fears complicity in the depraved and evil
machinations of the adult world? Or is she simply, well, simple, as in my
personal favorite of all Singers work, the story Gimpel the Fool? In
Jewish mystical literature, simplicity and wisdom, conventionally
opposites, can also be equals. Singer may be suggesting that we look for
true wisdom in simple, foolish characters like Gimpel and Shosha.

Or, Shosha could represent the simple past Aaron chooses over the
complex present. Her foolishness may be some divine counter-state. Or,
she might be regarded as a depression Aaron sinks into - depression and
confusion at the variety of choices: of ways to live, of opportunities
available on the new planet called the twentieth century.
Parts of this plot are hard to buy. Its certainly hard to take seriously
Aarons repeated rejections of offers to flee to America and bring Shosha
along. And Singer never fully explains exactly why, with the generous
offers he receives to save them both, Aaron chooses to stay and await
doom. Nothing in Aarons delightful, if rambling, ruminations really
explains such foolishness. Though Singer may want us to believe in his
main characters nihilistic inertia, it never really flies.
Were left to conclude that Sigmund Freud is the one important Jew with
whom Singer never made acquaintance: his book is one long sexual wishfulfillment fantasia, with not much thought given to the real human desire
to survive. For if theres one thing this book illustrates beautifully, its the
extent to which the Jews of Europe were completely sentient, completely
conscious of the settling darkness, completely aware of just how bad
things could get.

Zionism, Stalinism, Hedonism, Chasidism in Shosha, all are found, one

by one, to be flawed escapes. In the end, Singer seems to be saying, there
were no escapes for the doomed Jews of Poland. Some of them managed
to jump through time machines and escape the yeshivas and shtetls of the
past. But history, in the form of the Nazis, caught up with them,
destroying their past, present and future. Aaron Greidinger tries to hold on
by marrying the child-like Shosha. It was a noble attempt, but ultimately
as foolish and flawed as the political and religious schemes that led so
many astray.