Study questions for Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story

No quiz this week—but please consider these questions as you read Enemies.

1.  Enemies ends with these paragraphs:
           
Tamara had several times listed Herman’s name in the missing-persons columns published in the Yiddish press, but without results.  Tamara believed that Herman had either killed himself or was hiding somewhere in an American version of his Polish hayloft.  One day the rabbi informed   Tamara that, because of the holocaust, the rabbinate had eased restrictions so that deserted wives could be married a second time.
           
And Tamara had replied, “Perhaps, in the next world—to Herman.”

How do you read Tamara’s final statement?  What does it tell us about her and her relationship to Herman? about the state of Holocaust survivors in America?

2.  What is the significance of the shrapnel that remains in Tamara’s hip?  Can it be read symbolically?

3.  In Chapter 5 we learn that Herman is afraid to have a child.  Why does he fear having children?  What does this tell us about him as a character?  About his relationship to the past?  To Judaism?

4. Herman is a ghost writer for an assimilated rabbi.  What does the idea of the ghost writer say about larger themes in the novel?

5. We meet Rabbi Lampert, Herman’s employer, in Chapter 1.4.  What is the Rabbi like?  What does his success tell us about American Jews? How does the novel view Lampert and other American assimilated Jews?   How does Singer depict the American gentiles, both white and black, that Herman encounters in America and how do these depictions work to create his overall depiction of life in America?

6. The dead are referred to continually in Enemies, most significantly perhaps through the character of Tamara, who is said to have risen from the dead, but in other references as well.  What is the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead in this novel?

7. What is the relationship between the "New World" and the "Old World" in this novel? How can we understand this relationship through our readings from week one?