"What can one do? How is one to live?" the narrator of Shosha asks, and though the setting of this novel is Warsaw of the Twenties and Thirties, before the war had given shape to the modern world, the existential dilemmas of philosophy and love behind these questions seem entirely modern. Love is so confusing that Tsutsik, the narrator, conducts affairs with five different women at once, and when he does settle down, it is with Shosha, the moronic and physically stunted sweetheart of his childhood, as if in demonstration of love's inner illogic. Matters of philosophy, which are closer to Tsutsik's heart, prove even more troublesome. He wishes he could find some universe of value and meaning in religion, wishes he could dig up out of the past some useful concept from Jewish mysticism, wishes he could salvage some significance from the old stetl. The only alternatives...