Electrifying…sparkles with Mangers song and poetry, and is brilliantly layered with literary and folkloric references. Tablet
There is something joyous about Mangers playful language. The Jewish Chronicle
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 hes 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.
