Isaac Bashevis Singer takes issue with those female critics who say that his fiction is misogynistic. He claims that the "liberated woman [who] suspects almost every man of being an antifeminist" is like the "Jew who calls every Gentile an anti-Semite." Just as the Jew wants to be represented in literature as an exceptional individual, the staunch feminist, Singer contends, "would like writers to write that every woman is a saint and a sage and every man is a beast and an exploiter." If that were to happen, then, Singer believes, literature would become an "ism," inevitably "false and often ridiculous." In his last two realistic novels, Enemies and Shosha, Singer does not make an "ism" out of woman. Though he states that "men and women are made out of the same dough but kneaded a little differently," he creates distinctive female characters who perform distinctive functions. On the one hand, Singer draws true-to-life portraits that resemble the kind of women he must have encountered in Poland and America during the first half of the twentieth century. With their familiar appearance and recognizable values, Singer's female characters lend verisimilitude to his fictional landscapes. They domesticate the unknown and help anchor a story to a particular time and place. Their customary behavior also reassures the Singer protagonist that his sense of reality is not at variance with his expectations of it. Their conspicuous presence prevents him from getting lost in the mercurial world. At the same time, however, Singer endows many of these female characters with symbolic powers, powers that move from known to unknown associations, from conventional to bizarre interpretations. Their emblematic qualities unsettle and disorient the Singer protagonist. Not only do they transport him to the biblical and mythic past, but they prod him to explore his own guarded interior, to discover unpleasant truths about himself.

In Enemies, Singer's first English-translated novel with an American setting, he does not create just one woman to disrupt or stabilize the psychic equilibrium of his protagonist, the holocaust-evader Herman Broder. As in his earlier novels, The Magician of Lublin and The Slave, he has his hero embroiled with several women of disparate backgrounds and religions. Though Broder fears deportation for marrying three women, he cannot part with any of them. They represent illegal possessions that compel him to evade the authorities and repeat the subterfuge he practiced during the war. These women are the tantalizing prizes for which he, the compulsive gambler, must risk his fortune to avoid the tedium of wellbeing. They are also his potential enemies who would mete out the punishment he craves, should they discover his multiple infidelity. However, they embody aspects of womanhood he needs to complement his depleted life. Each restores fragments of his shattered self.

Yadwiga, the family servant who hid Broder in a hayloft during the war, is a vestige of the pre-holocaust world whom he marries to recapture his supremacy in that world. As the lower-class gentile woman who feels privileged to be the wife of her former Jewish master, she is the soul of compliance. Yadwiga keeps the same clean household she provided for his family in the old country and cooks the familiar dishes he had liked in the past. She is responsive to his sexual advances and readily accepts his unexplained absences. Adhering to her circumscribed position, Yadwiga thus assures Broder that his former patriarchal world is still intact.

Yadwiga also represents the pagan Polish past that Broder, a cerebral Jew, covertly admires. Her elaborate Polish superstitions governing every sphere of life, her magic spells to ward off evil spirits, her simplistic explanations of complex phenomena evoke an appealing primitivism more manageable than the baffling modernity with which Broder must cope. A peasant toughened by the poverty and physical abuse of the Polish village, Yadwiga likewise seems more durable and more self-reliant than the modern Jewish women Broder has known. In New York City of the 1940s, however, Yadwiga is lost. She is forced to become the homebound immigrant wife who has difficulty learning the language and finding her way in a strange place. Totally dependent on Broder to be her mediator with urban America, she becomes his child for whom he reluctantly cares. As an abstraction of the primitive, she appears charming to Broder; as the actual primitive ill-equipped to survive in the modern world, she is burdensome to him.

To insure Broder's not leaving her, Yadwiga wants to convert to Judaism and be the Jewish mother of his child. As proof of her intentions, she becomes more observant than her religiously bankrupt husband. Keeping a kosher household and celebrating all the Jewish holidays, she is Singer's embodiment of self-generating spirituality. So intense is her desire to be Jewish, she resembles the biblical convert, Ruth. Unlike Boaz, however, Herman prefers that she remain the Gentile: the alien, forbidden woman with whom he does not have to share his innermost being. As soon as he finds himself enjoying any prolonged intimacy with Yadwiga, he is off to see his Jewish mistress, Masha.

In one crucial respect, Singer's Yiddish protagonist is very different from his Jewish-American counterpart. Many of them lust after the shikse, the gentile woman, considering her more seductive, more lubricious, whereas Herman Broder finds the Jewish woman sexually more enticing, more venturesome. Indeed his mistress Masha has a more hyperactive libido than any of Portnoy's bawdy girlfriends. Her high-powered eroticism, however, should not be interpreted solely as Singer's bid to titillate his readers. Promiscuous in the death camps, Masha is the holocaust victim who desperately indulged in sexuality to feel alive. In this nightmare universe she had subscribed to the leading principle of what the disaffected Broder calls the new "metaphysic": "In the beginning was lust…. The godly, as well as the human principle is desire." Indeed this view is not too different from the rabbinic notion that "sex is the leaven in the dough," the force that causes the growth of civilization. But what happens to Masha and Singer's other sexually driven women is that their overuse of sex as leaven leads not to growth but to decay. No child but a false pregnancy is the result of Masha's incessant coupling with Broder. A perverse Yiddish Molly Bloom, she sinks into greater forms of depravity and entertains wanton possibilities: "Would Herman copulate with an animal if all humans had perished?"; "What would she do if her father were still alive and had developed an incestuous passion for her?" Masha suggests so many immodest proposals that Broder ultimately fears she is a demonic temptress from another sphere. Undoubtedly, Masha is Singer's reincarnation of Lilith, the Kabbalah's devilish seductress and promiscuous mistress of God. Like the childless Lilith, she is the "embodiment of everything that is evil and dangerous in the realm of sex." Union with her, as with Lilith, becomes for Broder a guilt-ridden alliance.

But Masha has more than sexual charms to entice Broder. The same energy that fuels her eroticism fires her artistic temperament. When she is not a Lilith figure, she is a Scheherazade inventing captivating tales to divert her internal persecutors so she can go on living. An actress as well as storyteller, Masha embodies the esthetic sense that Broder lost and seeks to repossess. Unlike Broder, the ghost writer, who gives expression to other people's thoughts, Masha creates out of her own lurid experiences and her own idiosyncratic imagination. Yet so volatile is her nature, so beguiling is she to others, that Broder is uncertain that she and her esthetic sense will remain with him. Indeed her very elusiveness makes her all the more desirable.

Masha also attracts Broder because she has endured the worst ravages of the holocaust he had been spared. Just as Singer in the preface to Enemies states "he did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust," so the unscathed Broder feels deprived since he had not been one of the persecuted. Intimacy with the emotionally scarred Masha enables him to feel intimate with the devastating effects of the holocaust. Her nightmares become his. He vicariously endures "all the savagery, all the humiliations" of the Nazis. In the ruins of Poland he, too, is violated and cheated by fellow survivors. By identifying with Masha's suffering, Broder finds some relief for his own survivor guilt. Moreover, Masha expresses his rage against God. A rebellious female Job, she challenges God's authority and accuses Him of being ineffectual and indifferent: "If God is almighty and omnipotent," she charges, "He ought to be able to stand up for His beloved people. If He sits in heaven and stays silent, that means it must bother Him as much as last year's frost." More sacrilegious than the majority of Singer's males, Masha even suggests that the Jews have invented a benevolent God to replace the true God who hates them.

Along with voicing Broder's blasphemy against God, Masha enacts his paranoid and masochistic tendencies. Another of Singer's self-punishing and punitive women, she demonstrates Broder's antisocial and self-destructive behavior. Distrustful of Jews and Gentiles alike, she fails to have amicable relations with them. Perpetually fighting with her old mother, she cuts off any maternal affection. Expecting a repetition of past horrors, she enjoys neither her work in the city nor a long-awaited trip to the country. Haunted by the dead, she feels unentitled to go on living, and when her mother dies, she is compelled to join her. Thus Masha fulfills Herman's own death wish. When she urges him to commit suicide with her, he calls her "his angel of death." But since she accuses him of being a Nazi and "a coward afraid of his own shadow," he regards Masha as his enemy, la belle dame sans merci who would consign him to her private hell.

Tamar, Herman's first wife, is, unlike Masha, a woman of exceptional mercy whom the holocaust has more humanized than brutalized. She had formerly been another of those capricious activists whom Singer had mockingly described as "the incarnation of the masses, always following some leader, hypnotized by slogans, never really having an opinion of her own." But the war quickly caused Tamar to learn what she valued most. She protected her children until their death and did not, like Masha, succumb to the lewd behavior of the concentration camps. With great effort, she preserved her chastity and did not sully her image as mother and wife.

If Masha is Singer's variation of the concupiscent Lilith, then Tamar is his version of the Shekhina-Matronit, the goddess of the Kabbalah who preserves her chastity "where the general atmosphere is one of intensive sexual activity or even promiscuity." Like the Holy Land with whom the goddess is associated, Tamar does not permit herself to be "defiled or enjoyed by a stranger." Similarly, when Tamar reappears in Broder's life, she assumes another role of the Shekhina-Matronit, that of the comforting, all-protective mother. Like the goddess who is the anxiety-allaying "opener of the gates of the Beyond," Tamar, who has recently returned from the dead with a special knowledge of the dead, assures Broder that his children exist in another world. To help him forget the bitterness of death, she tries to make his present life more bearable. Recognizing how strong his loyalties are to Yadwiga and Masha, Tamar refuses to press her wifely claims and be "the third wheel on his broken wagon."

The exemplum of righteousness, Tamar acts as Broder's moral guide. She advises him to live permanently with Yadwiga since she is to bear his child. In this respect Tamar is a magnanimous version of the biblical Sarah. Since Tamar's own Jewish offspring have been killed, she urges her husband to accept as his rightful heir the child of the pagan Yadwiga, the latter-day Hagar. But Broder is not an Abraham of old, the patriarch who at great personal cost provided for both Ishmael and Isaac. Broder is the Jewish boy-man who hid his head in the hayloft while his children were being slaughtered. And when in America he is given a second opportunity to be a father, he feels unfit for the task and flees from his responsibilities.

At the end of Enemies Singer is ambiguous about Broder's fate. He either kills himself or is hiding "in an American version of a Polish hayloft." But there is no doubt about Tamar's actions. A Jewish Griselda as well as a Sarah, she remains faithful to the vanished Broder. Refusing the offers of other men, she vows to marry her derelict husband in the next world. Meanwhile, assuming Broder's place as the supporter of Yadwiga and her new daughter, Tamar acts the way she did in the past, with great devotion and reliability. Because Broder's avoidance of duty had made him the weaker of the species, Tamar becomes of necessity the strong matriarch of the post-holocaust all-female family.

Through female bonding, the Jewish wife and the gentile wife are not the enemies Broder feared they would become. Sharing a common destiny of abandonment, they have, through their mutual concern, created a home in the alien world. Through their joint rearing of the Broder daughter, they have insured the continuity of the family and the perpetuation of the Jewish people. In their own way, they have partially restored the ravaged past which the lost Broder would immediately recognize and cherish. As women who survive with dignity and purpose, they not only provide a sanctuary for an errant husband but they reflect Singer's hope that a meaningful existence is still possible after the holocaust.

In Shosha, Singer's fictionalized version of his memoir, A Young Man in Search of Love, the women are not strong survivors attempting to rehabilitate an emotionally crippled hero and build a new life for themselves. Living in pre-Hitler Poland, and mostly unaware of the impending catastrophe, they serve primarily as the subject matter for the writer protagonist, Aaron Greidinger. They are not his moral reformers but mid-wives for his creativity. Their conflicting opinions are catalysts to his thinking. Their erotic beings, their confused psyches, their artistic yearnings, their spiritual dimensions take possession of his imagination and demand expression.

Singer again creates many women to charm his protagonist. They satisfy both Greidinger's healthy appetite for sexual diversity and his unhealthy Don Juanism preventing his attachment to any one woman. But, above all, they represent the forbidden secular world, causing him to rebel against the confining orthodoxy of his fathers. As the tantalizing "other," the profane sensibility, they broaden his outlook and the scope of his writing; they complicate his life and add complexity to his work.

Unfortunately, in this ninth Singer novel to appear in English translation, the tantalizing women are not truly tantalizing. Though their names are changed and they live in another decade, their personalities are similar to those of Enemies and only thinly disguised from their real-life counterparts in Singer's memoir. Just as Singer's first common-law wife was a Communist who, with their son, left him to go to Russia, Greidinger's first affair in Warsaw is with the Communist, Dora Stolnitz, who is more in love with the party than with him. She is Singer's political woman who attempts to lure the author from his decadent art of storytelling to write tracts to sway public opinion and alter the course of history. She conforms to Schopenhauer's definition of the woman as "blind optimist" for she believes, as did the pre-war Tamar, that collectivist action can bring about a "bright tomorrow." Though her doctrinaire mentality clashes with Greidinger's artistic temperament, their bodies remain friendly. In Singer's treatment of eros, sexual pleasure is often enhanced rather than harmed by conflicting ideologies. Nor does Singer allow Dora's Marxist indoctrination to prevent her from being a nurturing woman—cooking Greidinger sumptuous breakfasts and faithfully washing his underwear. As for the constancy of her party loyalty, it is short-lived. Visiting the presumed utopia and finding a dystopia, Dora, like Singer's other female revolutionaries, is bitterly disappointed. Rescued from the brink of suicide, she shares Greidinger's view [which also happens to be Singer's] "that you can't help mankind and that those who worry too much about the fate of man must sooner or later become cruel." In his own life Singer was unable to prevent his common-law wife's wholehearted embrace of communism, the psychic and political inelasticity which made her into an "ism." In his fictional world, however, he is able to effect the transformation of character which he was powerless to bring about in his own world. Thus Dora, the ideologue who had tried to convert the artist, is instead converted by him. Unlike Singer's intractable common-law wife, Dora does not act like a predictable type but has the flexibility to change her views.

Celia Chentshiner, the older married woman Greidinger sees, is a bourgeois type. She is Singer's Jewish Madame Bovary who, bored by her Zionist husband and betrayed by her nihilistic lover, reads romantic novels and commits adultery with younger men. She provides Greidinger with ready access to her boudoir and seasoned experience in illicit love. Assuming sole responsibility for her infidelity, she encourages him to have guilt-free sex with her, to violate with pleasure the taboos of his orthodox past. Because she is the artist manque, she also seduces Greidinger to be united with a genuine artist. A member of Poland's Jewish leisure class, she hopes to absorb his creative powers to give meaning to her aimless life. She vicariously revels in his heightened sensitivity; she is excited by his artistic risks and discoveries. To repay him for his vitalizing presence, she generously shares her home's material comforts with the impoverished Greidinger and acquaints him with her drawing room's secular culture.

Greidinger, however, becomes surfeited with middle-age lust and literary talk and soon chooses a less cultivated relationship with his less complicated Polish servant, Tekla. Or to use Levi-Strauss's categories for the Gentile and the Jewish, Greidinger prefers the "raw" over the "cooked." The gentile woman appeals to the Singer protagonist because she poses no danger of his identifying her with his Jewish mother and becoming entangled in Oedipal ties. The shikse also represents the seductive world of nature, which Greidinger as a young yeshiva student yearned for but was prohibited from enjoying. Of the robust Tekla, whose favors Greidinger has had, he rhapsodizes: "Her cheeks were the color of ripe apples. She gave forth a vigor rooted in the earth, in the sun, in the whole universe." As a creature whose wholesome beauty is untampered by intellect or morality, she does not set impossible goals for him or herself. Grateful to him for rescuing her from her predatory countrymen, she is content to be a source of energy to him. An embodiment of the Polish common folk at their generous best, she desires only what will make him happy.

What ultimately makes Greidinger happy is to return to his childhood love, Shosha, whom Singer equates with the Poland of his youth. Indeed the fictional Shosha is based on an actual Shosha, Singer's precious childhood friend whom he memorializes at the end of his autobiography, A Day of Pleasure. Like her fictional namesake in Singer's story "Short Friday," Shosha is the ideal companion—appreciative, comforting, and selfless. When Singer's family moves away, he never forgets her and "in time Shosha becomes for [him] an image of the past."

This is not the first time in his autobiographies or his fiction that Singer has employed a female to personify the Jewish past or the Jews of Poland. Like the biblical prophets, Singer includes frequent references in his works to the people of Israel as a woman who is divorced, widowed, abandoned, or raped. The most haunting personification occurs in Singer's early novel Satan in Goray, where the heroine, Rechele, represents misguided seventeenth-century Polish Jewry. She endures all the catastrophes of her generation. Born in 1648, the year of the Khmelnitski massacres, she loses her mother at the age of five and is abandoned by her father fleeing Cossack persecutors. A victim of the pogroms, she is reared by a superstitious grandmother, just as the Jews in their benighted circumstances were ruled by their own superstitions. Destitute, Rechele is forced to marry Mates, an impotent religious ascetic, just as the Polish Jews adopted a stern pietistic Judaism to cope with their adversity. And like the Jews who quickly forsook religious ascetism for the hedonism of false messiahs, Rechele succumbs to the sensuality of the self-proclaimed prophet Gedalyia. She, like the Jews of Goray, pays for her sinful actions. Impregnated by Satan, she gives birth to an evil offspring.

In contrast to Rechele and the Jews of Goray, who have prostituted themselves by embracing false extremes, the fictional Shosha, epitomizing pre-Hitler Polish Jewry, has preserved her purity despite the corrupt world about her. When Greidinger meets her again on Krochmalna Street, twenty years later, he is struck by her unsullied innocence. Though abysmal conditions have kept Shosha a backward child, her stunted growth has a significant advantage for him. Her arrested development makes possible the arrest of time. Through her child's eyes, he sees the world as he had remembered it. Since death has no palpable reality for her, she speaks in a familiar Yiddish of deceased shopkeepers who are still alive for her, of destroyed landmarks and defunct rituals that in her mind still exist. She also relates to Greidinger as if he were the precocious boy of the past, and he in turn is rejuvenated by her. Shosha thus functions as Singer's "metaphorical projection of a Peter Pan-like permanence" attempting to avert the steady decline of the present and future.

Shosha is also Singer's ghetto Jew for whom confined quarters and reduced circumstances are familiar and thus preferable. Distrustful of an altered environment, she only fleetingly enjoys the marvels of the formerly restricted city which Greidinger, the would-be emancipated Jew, wants to share with her. Like the prisoner who initially relishes his freedom, she soon feels ill-at-ease in the broad expanse of Warsaw and wants to return to her circumscribed street.

Only one woman tempts Greidinger to leave Shosha for her: the highly sexed, highly intellectual Russian-born American actress, Betty Slonim. Such women frequently enthrall Singer's males because they are not only physically and cerebrally exciting but they are enticingly at odds with the shtetl notion of femininity. They are seen as trespassers in the male domain and as such are regarded as freaks of female nature who must be routed from the community. For there is an old shtetl saying: "When the hen begins to crow like a rooster, it is time to take it to the shoykhet." But in Singer's fiction society is frequently spared the task of being the shoykhet, the ritual slaughterer, for these women internalize society's negative opinion of them and act as their own shoykhet.

Resembling the distraught Masha of Enemies, Betty Slonim is a self-destructive figure. In conflict over her needs and her gender, she is the ideal person to star in Greidinger's play, The Maiden of Ludmir, which, like Singer's play Yentl, concerns a girl who wants to live like a man, study the Torah, become a Hasidic rabbi and preach to the people. Like the maiden of Ludmir, Betty accuses an anti-feminist Moses and a male God of granting all the higher religious privileges to men and the lesser duties to women. Betty, like the heroine, is possessed of two dybbuks: the pessimistic male iconoclast and the jaded female prostitute. Both aspects of her androgynous being captivate Greidinger. As a latter-day Schopenhauer, she gets him to share her lugubrious thoughts about human nature. As the decadent mistress of a crass Jewish-American businessman, she persuades him to grab some erotic pleasure with her before they vanish forever. Though she is a successful Potiphar's wife, getting the dreamer-artist Greidinger to sin with her, she warns him to part company with her. "The demons are after me," she shrieks. "It's always like this when a spark of happiness lights up my life. Keep away from me! I'm cursed, cursed, cursed."

The possessed Betty Slonim suffers from a split nationality as well as a split personality. She is not at home in any part of the world. As the cultivated Yiddish actress of Slavic origins, she does not fit in with the superficial Yiddish theater of America. Among the Jewish thespians of Poland, she is dismissed as a brazen American actress who speaks an inauthentic Yiddish and is obsessed with playing perverse roles. Seeing no artistic future for herself in any country, she wants to rescue Greidinger from a doomed Poland and promote his career in America. Unappreciated herself, she hopes to live vicariously through his achievements. Like Singer's supporters, Betty Slonim represents the American descendants of East European Jews who will constitute his enthusiastic reading public. Saving Greidinger and extolling his artistic merits will be her most important contribution. Otherwise, she is Singer's superfluous woman, distraught and estranged, who ultimately commits suicide.

Greidinger's fascination with the disturbed Betty Slonim and the histrionic modernism she embodies is short-lived. Just as Singer refused to abandon Polish Jewry as the subject matter for his fiction, so Greidinger ultimately marries Shosha and the traditional old world values she represents. Though Shosha has been emotionally scarred and is inept in many ways, she, like Singer's Polish Jewry, possesses many endearing qualities. She is the epitome of fidelity. An old-fashioned woman like Greidinger's mother, she is the chaste Jewish wife who will never betray him. Her faithfulness to Greidinger provides him with a model for his own faithfulness to God and the Jewish people. She is an ideal pupil whom he instructs and who in turn instructs him. Scantily educated, she is still interested in Greidinger's obscure philosophizing and through her naive but probing question helps him clarify his views. She becomes his muse. Her bizarre fantasies and superstitions inspire his use of the supernatural in his work. Her "qualities of a medium," her "primitivism, directness, sincerity" influence his literary style. Unable to have children herself as Polish Jewry was prevented from reproducing itself, Shosha becomes Greidinger's child whom he is not ashamed to cherish in the most sophisticated company. Indeed Greidinger treasures the childlike Shosha for much the same reasons Singer values the special qualities of children: "Our children, God bless them, don't read to discover their identity, as so many wiser adults pretend to do. Young as they are, fresh from the egg, they know exactly who they are and where they belong…. With an instinct no fashion-making can destroy, the child has become the guardian of those moral and religious values the adults have rejected in the name of an ill-conceived notion of social progress." Similarly, the live and even the deceased Shosha is Greidinger's instinctive guardian of vanishing morals and religious values. Though she suffers a heart attack when expelled from her life-sustaining Krochmalna Street, Greidinger still waits in Israel for her to give him an answer about death's meaning.

Greidinger, at the age of seven, reassured Shosha: "Shoshele, don't be afraid. I will make it so that you will live forever." Singer kept Greidinger's promise. He immortalized Shosha in fiction. But Shosha and Singer's other female characters have made indispensable contributions to the male protagonists as well. In their actual or emblematic capacities, the women in Shosha and Enemies have prompted their men to embark upon a "soul expedition" (the original Yiddish title of Shosha). They have served as familiar landmarks or have beckoned them to uncharted territories. They have been confusers of the imagination and guides to the perplexed. Scenic wonders in their own right, they have enlivened the expedition and made it worth recording.