Word: shosha
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...SHOSHA by Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus & Giroux;277 pages...
...Shosha, Singer's eighth novel, is thus a variation on a theme that the author has played many times before, and not a whitless enjoyable for that. Among his many accomplishments, Singer is a master at showing how familiarity can breed contentment. Here again is Warsaw when hailing a cab meant finding a horse-drawn droshky; here are the smells and sounds of Krochmalna Street, the intrigue and gossip at the Writers' Club, the dark, snowy vistas on the Vistula...
Instead, Aaron marries Shosha, a stunted, retarded girl he had known as a child. He knows exactly what this move means: "I was rejecting a woman of passion, of talent, with the capability of taking me to wealthy America, and condemning myself to poverty and death from a Nazi bullet." Why? It is the most frequent question in Singer's fiction and the one least frequently answered. Aaron offers tentative explanations to himself and others: loyalty to the past that Shosha shared with him, a mystic identification with her simplicity, even the conviction that Shosha is the one woman...
...Shosha is crammed with such absolute opinions, but to enjoy the book a reader does not have to agree with them. Singer is the least didactic of writers. His attention is always on making his characters do and say diverting things. Dr. Morris Feitelzohn, Aaron's mentor and friend, has only a small role in events, but his erudite, sardonic comments add enormously to the novel's texture: "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...