Auschwitz Mon Amour

By R.Z. Sheppard

ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY by ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER 280 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

To get a quick idea of this novel by the great Yiddish storyteller I.B. Singer, imagine Chagall's Village in the Air done in the twisted, anguished style of Picasso's Guernica. Herman Broder, his wife Tatnara, and Masha, his mistress, are three Polish Jews who survived Nazi efficiency and are suspended in the limbo of a hot-and cold-running America. Below them is the dead world of Eastern European Jewry. Overhead is the infinite confusion of a cruel, capricious God.

Who else could have arranged Herman Broder's fate? He escaped the gas chambers by hiding in a hayloft for nearly three years. His food was brought and his waste removed by Yadwiga, an illiterate peasant girl. According to an eyewitness, Tamara and the Broders' two children were shot by Germans. So, after the war, Broder marries Yadwiga and brings her to New York. Speaking only rural Polish and afraid to venture more than a few blocks from her electrical-appliance heaven, Yadwiga lives like a contented cow.

Broder tells her he is a book salesman who must be on the road a lot. In truth, he is a ghostwriter for a rich rabbi. Broder spends half his nights with Masha, a beautiful neurotic who also survived the death camps. A high-strung package of insatiable hunger--cigarettes, sex and self-destruction--she is one of Singer's best creations.

When Broder's original wife Tamara turns up, a survivor after all, Singer's spiritual and psychological "ghost" story grows more bizarre. Still, Broder's attempts to manage the three women seem a likely retribution for his real and imagined sins. The author's simple narrative style makes his complex inter locking of hauntings and guilts perfectly natural. His understanding of emotions is profound. As he shows in Enemies, love distorted by apocalyptic history is an excruciating ordeal, especially for those who must wake each day from the graves of their own nightmares. sbR.Z. Sheppard

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