A Lost Chapter, and Character, from One of a Yiddish Master’s Most Famous Books

Because it was made into a 1989 film starring Anjelica Houston, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story may be his best-known novel. Like most of his books, it was originally serialized in Yiddish before being published in English. Singer carefully supervised translations of his work, often altering the English versions significantly—and the 1972 edition of Enemies is no exception. In this case, the author removed an entire character, a young woman named Nancy Isabelle. Rachel Mines has translated the chapter introducing Nancy Isabelle, who wanders into the bookstore run by the protagonist, Herman—a talmudic scholar tortured by surviving the Holocaust, his religious struggles, and his complex romantic entanglements: