Enemies: A Love Story

Enemies: A Love Story, a marvelous, mesmerizing novel by Isaac Singer, later a movie, has Herman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Coney Island circa 1949, hopelessly enmeshed in relationships with three women and eventually married to all of them. Raised as a devout Orthodox Jew, his faith is shattered by the events of his life; he is intellectual and sensitive. He has married the simple Polish peasant servant who risked her own life to save his. He is indebted and devoted to her as she adores him and is helpless without him in a new culture. He is in love with a beautiful, sexy, neurotic woman who also loves and needs him. Then his wife (played marvelously by Angelica Huston), who supposedly had died in the war, surfaces. She is attractive in a seasoned way, intellectual and wise. Their relationship had been volitile but also filled with respect, loyalty and memory, largely of their two children who perished in Poland. Herman is attached to each of the three: each is charming in her distinct manner; he cares about each; each needs him. He does not give himself completely to one woman because he is incapable of extricating himself from any of them. He bounces from one to another, engulfed in evasion, hopelessness and deceit. His situation is very poignant. I marveled at the paralysis of decision and sympathized. In the novel, however, the underlying cause and its connection with the Holocaust is made evident in a way it was not in the movie: he very clearly did not want to father children. He had renounced his paternity. In his earlier life, according to the novel, he did not want to have children but it happened in spite of his intentions. But their murder hardened him in his state of psychological hopelessness and infertility. He was swallowed up by the needs of the three women and his inability to say "no" because he was anti-paternal. At one point, Herman tells his wife that his then-mistress did not want to have children. She wisely responds: "If a woman loves a man, she wants to have his children." Shortly after that he is told that she is pregnant, agrees to marry her and hears her voice these words: "I wanted to have your child from the day I laid eyes on you." Clearly: the erotic, romantic and spousal are insepable, in this most carnal woman, from the maternal. Herman is a tragic exemplar of how the paternal/maternal infuses the spousal. The repression of fertility aborts the spousal relationship itself. This calls to mind a conversation in which a man, happily married with two children, told of seeing an old girlf friend who invited him back to her place. He refused. On arriving home, he told me, he looked at his wife and realized that going for the fling would not have been a "big thing." But he looked at his children and thought that he could never do such a thing. It was his fatherhood that sealed his fidelity. Lacking such paternal orientation, Herman could not give himself and became victim of his own needs and compulsions and those of his three lovers. What does this say about gay unions? About homosexuality and the paternal priesthood? About the plague of co-habitation? About the inability of our young men to commit? About our countraceptive culture? About the REAL needs of our young women? The crisis in paternity...flight from it, contempt for it, maginalization of it... is certainly the defining tragedy of our age. The story weaves a pattern of nihilism and seems incapable of anything but a tragic conclusion. But the ending is surprizing and largely satisfying as it delivers what is suggested in the title by means of the very thing that Herman most dreaded.