Rating: 
Summary: Nowhere plans for nobody
Review: "Shadows on the Hudson" is an excellent novel, even better than Singer's similiar but more compact "Enemies, a Love Story". Few writers have ever been able to involve the reader in the inner lives of fictional characters the way Singer could, and fewer still would have been able to make their stories so fascinating when they're all so cynical and often downtrodden, bemoaning God's silence and the corruption of modern man. Singer had a singular talent for exploring the chasm between expectations and reality, how we're almost always let down (and the post-WW2 Jews moreso than practically anyone in history), and how, for some totally inexplicable reason, we keep going. He made the absurd palpable for the modern reader, far better than even Camus and Sartre did, because he was an entertaining storyteller first, and THEN he was a philosopher.
This long, convoluted story of the lives of a half-dozen Jewish intellectuals and businesspeople in New York immediately after the second world war must be Singer's masterpiece. He often explored the same ideas in his novels---the point of existence and the role of the Jew in modern society---and in fact he often used philandering husbands and bitter wives and mistresses as primary characters, but he pulled it all together here into a riveting, beautiful story of obsession, regret, pain, and penitence that you simply don't want to end. That these people, and their endless torturous questions, aren't really important in the long run is precisely the final point of Singer's big novel: we make a tiny, swift ripple in the river and then we're gone, possibly forever; but it is how we grapple with the desires of the body and the needs of the mind and heart that gives our lives substance and form. Without this questioning and searching, without this rending of our spirit by apparently random or viscious events in our lives...without all of it, we would never turn to God. And then our small lives ARE meaningless.
At least, that's what I think Singer is trying to say. In the end, he was a fantastic writer who drew you into the story and kept you guessing until the end. Just like life itself...
Rating: 
Summary: Flickering Shadows
Review: "Shadows on the Hudson", like Isaac Bashevis Singer, has passion, power and ultimately no faith in modern life. His lothario alter-ego Grein's adventure when he runs off with the married daughter of a friend, Anna, sends ripples through their whole social world, in which Singer paints the moral universe of post-war American Jewery. The Yeshiva trained doctor and friend of Anna's millionaire father takes back the German wife who left him for a Nazi. The Berlin Yiddish comedian Yasha Kotik, Anna's first husband, is beastly enough to survive both the death camps and Broadway. Grein's old Warsaw friend survived the camps to make a horrendous marriage with a battleaxe in Florida who tries to swindle Anna over real estate. ... But there is no escaping the sense of scenes written to a set word count, to be read on a subway train in slow columns from a smudging rag, and there is no escaping the sense of perfunctoriness at Singer's tying up of the loose threads at the end: Grein, like many of Singer's sinning alter-egos, winds up repenting, cutting off all links to his earthly life and loves, taking up Jewish study in a yeshiva. The rest he abandons, more or less moved on, no more resolved, because really the values Singer prized cannot exist for them. The penultimate line of the novel, in a letter from Grein's cell in Jerusalem: "There can be no connection between a bound animal and an animal that roams free." Singer was condemned to roam free, remembering a world that no longer exists and atoning for a family and life long gone, and this book does not return that world to us, though his wilder, more forlorn fiction does.
Rating: 
Summary: Echoes Of The Holocaust
Review: Although I agree with the criticisma made by other readers, I still loves "Shadows On The Hudson" and consider it a worthwhile and engrossing book.Singer writes about a small group of exciles who survived the Holocaust be fleeing to New York City and creating a community in the shadows of the Hudson river. It was here that they contemplated their devastaing past and doubious future. The characters are intelleigent and intense, anguished by their expulsion from their homeland and the collapse of their cultural and religious values.
Rating:
Summary: Echoes Of The Holocaust
Review: Although I agree with the criticisma made by other readers, I still loves "Shadows On The Hudson" and consider it a worthwhile and engrossing book. Singer writes about a small group of exciles who survived the Holocaust be fleeing to New York City and creating a community in the shadows of the Hudson river. It was here that they contemplated their devastaing past and doubious future. The characters are intelleigent and intense, anguished by their expulsion from their homeland and the collapse of their cultural and religious values.
Rating:
Summary: Echoes Of The Holocaust
Review: Although I agree with the criticisms made by other readers, I still loved "Shadows On The Hudson and consider it a worthwhile and engrossing book. Singer wreites about a group of exciles who survived the Holocaust by fleeing to New York City and creating a community in the shadows of the Hudson River. It was here thT THEY CONTEMPLATED THEIR DEVASTATING PAST AND DUBIOUS FUTURE. tHE CHARACTERS are intellectually gifted and intensely emotional, anguished by their expulsion from their homeland and the collapse of their beliefs and values.
Rating:
Summary: Ecoes Of The Holocaust
Review: Although I agree with the criticisms made by other readers, I still loved "Shadows On The Hudson" and consider it a worthwhile and engrossing book. Singer writes about a small group of exciles who survive the Holocaut by fleeing to New York City and creating a community in the shadows of the Hudson river. It was here that they contemplated their devasting past and dubious future. The characters are intelligent and intense, anguished by their expulsion from their homeland and the collapse of their religious and cultural values. They had to reexamine the meaning of their life as they catapulted from lust to love to greed to wrenching boubts about ther existencdof their God
Rating:
Summary: Amazing and Inspiring
Review: I'm confused by the reviews complaining about this book's length, its subject matter, pace, characterization, etc. This narrative by Singer probes what people do each second of the day: think, consider, act, evaluate. If this does not hit home, you're not in the market for literature; you're merely in the market to be cheaply entertained. Although Shadows on the Hudson is an examination of a small circle of individuals distinct in their culture, religion, beliefs and actions it is everybody's story. The constant wrestle between your best and worst self, the constant questions of: Why am I not a better person? Why don't I behave in accordance with my beliefs, with what I know? Why do I love those whom I love? Why do I hate those whom I hate? What is the ramification of my own personal evil and goodness? What is the ramification of another's personal evil and goodness? Is there a God? What is God like? Why is earth life the way it is, replete with sorrow, suffering, happiness, joy, shame, anger? And after the characters have examined their questions and wrestled their own answers, the bottle points to you: What are your questions? How will you answer them? What will you use your time on earth for? To grow, to consider, to try, to experience and come to terms with your questions, or to ignore those possibilities and instead read books and watch television and movies that only placate you and leave you just as, or worse off, than you were when you began? Singer has done us all a service with this piece; I have rarely been so moved or stimulated intellectually and spiritually as I have been reading this Nobel prize winning masterpiece. Amazing, amazing work.
Rating:
Summary: Is this Bashevis Singer's "apologia pro vita sua"?
Review: In his inimitable style, Singer delineates the world of post-war European Jews in New York--all either Holocaust survivors or persons whose lives were disrupted by the Holocaust, for whom traditional Judaism no longer provides the answers but who find no comfort in other ideologies: Bolshevism, rational secularism, spiritualism. There is a great deal of metaphysical and philosophical conversation, but as the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam says: "Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint but evermore went out by the same door wherein I went." The main character is deeply flawed, having rejected the narrow religious path of his father, but who comes to terms with it in the end, which I found surprising, since his experiences seem to mirror Bashevis Singer's life--an ultraorthodox childhood followed by an escape into the intelligentsia of Warsaw, then New York--but to my knowledge, Singer never returned to observance in the way his hero does. However, he writes with such warmth, one gets the feeling he wished he could. I did NOT find the length off-putting, nor did I feel that it needed further editing, as some other reviewers suggested.
Rating: 
Summary: Depresing book about depressed people
Review: In short, this book does not have any message to pass to the readers. It's too long and full of philosophical conversations, occasionaly extremely dificult to read due to endless and pointless monologs so one can skip pages and pages (which I did not) without losing anything at all. And no message! Don't read it !
Rating:
Summary: Singer's Stunning, Most Direct Comment on the Holocaust
Review: Many have speculated why Singer left this novel untranslated into English for almost 40 years. Once you are into it, you will know why: this is the darkest thing he ever wrote. "Satan in Goray" or the art of Goya look postively cheerful next to this. Singer tracks a group of European refugees in New York who have escaped Hitler by the skin of their teeth. They cannot even consider faith, or God--one says, "if God exists, he must be a Nazi." But Singer concludes that it is impossible to live like this; madness, suicide, self-destruction are the results. The novel is an argument, which is worse: a world with God and Hitler, or a world without God but still Hitler?
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