The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted
by very human temptations and pains--a delightful new translation
perfect for fans of Michael Chabon
Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled
from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers,
which was written just before the outbreak of World War II.
As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of
his previous life when he's born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on
Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but
the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations:
a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions
and temptations that shape the human world.
Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar,
The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik
Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern
and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the
shtetl.
