“Enemies, A Love Story” by Isaac Bashevis Singer

DIRECTED BY: Stathis Livathinos

VENUE: Theatre of the Society for Macedonian Studies

ΟPENING: March 2023

In “Enemies, A Love Story” a man tries to get over his nightmare, the insurmountable trauma of the death camps he survived, by meeting the three most important women in his life in the search for romance, love and salvation.

Α FEW WORDS ABOUT THE PLAY

"Herman... It’s not our fault.

The world around has fallen apart

and we are its broken pieces."

Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor, is living in New York City a few years after the end of World War Two. His memories of persecution force him to live life in the shadows and to be forever covering his tracks. Married to his Polish maid, who saved him, he has a mistress, Masha, with whom he is in love. Things get more complicated still when Tamara, the ex-wife he believed to have perished, shows up in town.

Herman tries to grasp what his existence could mean in a world where philosophy has no answers, faith in the progress of humanity has fallen by the wayside, and God is dead. As he seeks an exit from his trauma, the choices he makes hold him accountable to the law of the land and to God, as well as to his own ethical code.

The Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote the novel “Enemies, Α Love Story” in 1966, in Yiddish. The dark world his protagonists inhabit yields eroticism, black humour and deep existential irony, just as laughter accompanies misery when our conscience rejects the complacency of reassuring narratives. In Roy Chen’s adaptation for the stage, Herman’s character is called upon to survive but vacillates between guilt and pleasure as he remains unable to reach a decision about his life.