Book of Paradise
Regular price
€17.50
The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains, in a new translation
On being expelled from Paradise, young Samuel Abba pulls a crafty trick, managing to arrive on earth with his memory intact. He quickly begins regaling the humans around him with mischievous stories of a Paradise far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the same divisions and temptations that shape the human world.
The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece, and the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers. Written in the midst of rising anti-Semitism in 1930s Europe, its raucous blend of sacred and profane is a slyly profound reflection of the author's turbulent times.
Itzik Manger was born in 1901 to a Jewish family in Czernowitz (then Austria-Hungary; now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). He began publishing poems and ballads in literary journals after the First World War, moving to Bucharest where he wrote for the local Yiddish press and gave lectures. Manger's literary reputation was made in Warsaw: he relocated there in 1928 and found considerable success publishing volumes of poetry and his own literary journal, doing public readings and composing lyrics for the Yiddish cabaret and the Yiddish film industry.
Manger began writing The Book of Paradise in the mid-1930s amid rising anti-Semitism. The novel was initially serialized in 1937 in the Warsaw-based newspaper Naye Folkstsaytung. Forced to leave Poland the next year, Manger negotiated the publication of The Book of Paradise as a stateless person in Paris. He later moved to England and then the United States before settling in Israel, where he died in 1969.