Enemies, a Love Story

Infobox Book
name = Enemies, a Love Story
title_orig = Sonim, di Geshichte fun a Liebe
translator = Aliza Shevrin and Elizabeth Shrub


image_caption = Cover of the 1997 paperback edition
author = Isaac Bashevis Singer
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = Yiddish
series =
subject =
genre = Novel
publisher = Farrar, Straus and Giroux
release_date = 1966
english_release_date = 1972
media_type = Print (Paperback & Hardback)
pages = 228 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-374-51522-0
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Enemies, a Love Story" ( _yi. "Sonim, di Geshichte fun a Liebe") is a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer first published serially in the "Jewish Daily Forward" in 1966. The English translation was published in 1972.

Plot summary

Set in New York City in 1949, the novel follows Holocaust survivor Herman Broder. Throughout the war he survived in a hayloft, taken care of by his non-Jewish, Polish servant, Yadwiga, whom he later takes as his wife in America. Meanwhile, he has an affair with another Holocaust survivor, Masha. To Yadwiga, he poses as a traveling book-salesman despite the fact he is simply a ghost writer for a corrupt rabbi. He wanders about New York with a constant paranoia and perpetual desperation, made more complicated when his first wife from Poland, Tamara, who was thought to be killed in the Holocaust, comes to New York.

Film adaptation

A film of the same title, based on the book and directed by Paul Mazursky, was released in 1989.

The Manhattan apartment building with a curved, ivory facade in the movie is The Paterno, at the intersection of Riverside Drive and 116th Street.