{"id":1798,"date":"2026-02-24T14:29:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T14:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1798"},"modified":"2026-02-24T14:29:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T14:29:15","slug":"inspiration-behind-the-end-of-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/inspiration-behind-the-end-of-romance\/","title":{"rendered":"Inspiration behind The End of Romance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The End of Romance<\/em> is very loosely based on Isaac Bashevis Singer\u2019s novel Enemies, A Love Story<\/a><\/em>, which came out in Yiddish in 1966 and English in 1972. I read it in 2019, at which point I had been immersing myself in American Jewish literature for a decade, but it was my first of his books. Nobody ever talks about Singer when they talk about Bellow, Malamud, and Roth; in my life, almost no one but me talks about Singer, period. Although he is an agreed-upon, Nobel-winning literary legend, he seems to be waning from view. Consensus can have that effect, I know, but I\u2019d like to reverse it. He\u2019s become a massive influence for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Singer praised \u201cthe Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it\u201d for their \u201cquiet humor [and] gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by.\u201d I buy most of that, but not the \u201cdemand and command\u201d bit. Singer is a snappy, assertive prose stylist \u2013 not showy, but supremely confident. He writes more frankly and oddly about sex than the vast majority of twenty-first century writers, and he excels at declarations that seem simple, but get strange when you poke at them. In his story \u201cGimpel the Fool,\u201d Gimpel justifies all his choices with the one-line theology \u201cShoulders are from God, and burdens too.\u201d Sure, Gimpel, but what about feet for walking away? Mouths for talking back? Do those not come from God, too?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commanding though Singer\u2019s sentences may be, though, his characters do nothing but muddle and sneak. All kinds of bizarre things happen to them. They marry demons by mistake; they accidentally get addicted to Baruch Spinoza\u2019s body of work and let life pass them by; they get into catastrophic visa-marriage schemes with spoiled rich girls; they survive the Holocaust. Rarely do their stories end happily, but not many end in total crisis, either. Instead, as the novelist Dara Horn notes in her book People Love Dead Jews<\/a><\/em>, Singer \u201cended almost every one of his novels not with a resolution but with the protagonist disappearing, whether by running or by literally locking himself into a closet for the rest of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horn argues that Singer\u2019s penchant for disappearance endings fits into a pattern of Jewish literary humility. Jewish writers, she thinks, ground their work in the \u201cknowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world,\u201d which is too full of strange troubles to be understood. (See: demons, Nazis, etc.). Singer\u2019s abrupt, unsatisfying endings are a perfect example of this knowledge. They make manifest the idea of a Jewish literature that portrays and embraces the instability and incoherence of Jewish history. How could you write a coherent, stable story, Singer\u2019s body of work seems to ask, when life can always be destabilized, along no logical lines, by a landlord, a pogrom, a Hitler, or \u2013 as in \u201cThe Gentleman from Cracow\u201d \u2013 a friendly rich guy who proves to be Satan himself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I would like to think it is because I am a Jewish writer that I gravitate towards Singer\u2019s approach to endings. I get irritated when novels I like end too happily, and even more irritated at sad endings that I knew were coming, or that preclude future change. I like the idea of an ending that feels like a new beginning; I want to give the reader the sense that a second phase of the story is imminent, and that it will be even trickier, tougher, or stranger than the one I just got done telling. Enemies, A Love Story <\/em>ends in just this way, and I hope The End of Romance<\/em> does, too.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The End of Romance will be published on 26th February and is available to order <\/em>now<\/a>. If you wish to hear more of Lily Meyer’s thoughts on writing and romance, sign up for her free event Self-Discover<\/em>y A<\/em>fter Heartbreak on 5th March<\/em> here<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The End of Romance is very loosely based on Isaac Bashevis Singer\u2019s novel Enemies, A Love Story, which came out in Yiddish in 1966 and English in 1972. I read it in 2019, at which point I had been immersing myself in American Jewish literature for a decade, but it was my first of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[307,306,316,310,315,312,314,311,320,319,318,313,303,66,308,309,18,304,160,305,27,62,317],"class_list":["post-1798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-anti-romance","tag-anti-romcom","tag-anti-zionist","tag-dating","tag-jewish","tag-jewish-authors","tag-jewish-book-recs","tag-jewish-books","tag-jewish-dating","tag-jewish-faith","tag-jewish-identity","tag-jewish-reads","tag-lily-meyer","tag-literary-fiction","tag-modern-romance","tag-modern-romance-books","tag-reading-recommendations","tag-rom-com","tag-romantic-comedy","tag-romantic-fiction","tag-tbr-list","tag-verve-books","tag-yiddish"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":false,"total_views":0,"today_views":0},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1803,"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/1803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}