Our April read for the Classics Book Group, this is a darkly funny novel of Herman Broder, an immigrant from Poland now living in 1949 Brooklyn with the pleasures and problems of three wives. Singer twists a fairly standard situation-comedy setup by making Herman and his three wives all immigrants more or less forced to New York by the Holocaust and its aftermath. Herman, whose entire family perished, spent the war hiding in a hayloft, where he was protected by his family's Polish maid, Yadwiga. He has now married her out of gratitude. Alas, he can't keep his hands off Masha, who spent years in the camps with her mother, and who is seriously damaged as a result. Then there's Tamara, Herman's original wife and the mother of his murdered children. Herman was told she had been killed, but she emerges, having spent years in one of Stalin's labor camps. Written first in Yiddish and made into a film of the same name.
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