科研之友
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摘要
In his representative work, Enemies: A Love Story, Isaac Singer, the Jewish American writer and the Nobel Prize winner, represents the various memories of and the attempts at the reconstruction of identity by four characters, who are the survivors with complicated ethical relations between each other. Herman's olfactory memory solidifies his identity as Yadwiga's husband and guardian. The loss of his memory about living through thick and thin together with Tamara and their children helps him evade his role as a father. The fusion of his memories about history, though, lets him choose to be an eternal sufferer wandering all over the place. Tamara's body memory consolidates her own identity as a mother and enables her to become Americanized as a bookshop owner and a protector for the future of the Jewish community. Yadwiga, as a carrier of olfactory memory, goes through an agonizing life with changing identities, from a maid to a wife and then to a single mother, and from a non-Jewish woman to a believer in Judaism. Masha's traumatic memory puts her through a lot of torments, changing her identity from a refugee to an extramarital lover and, finally, a dead person. These survivors form their family memory while trying to construct ethical relations with other people and integrate their individual memory and family memory into their long history memory, thus reconstructing their identities eventually.
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