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"On being expelled from Paradise, young Samuel Abba pull 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." --
About the author
Itzik Manger was born in 1901 in Czernowitz (then Austria-Hungary; now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). He began publishing poems after WWI, moving to Bucharest where he wrote for the local Yiddish press. Relocating to Warsaw in 1928, Manger found considerable success publishing his own literary journal, doing public readings and composing Yiddish lyrics for the cabaret and film. Manger began writing
The Book of Paradise in the mid-1930s amid rising anti-Semitism. Forced to leave Poland in 1938, Manger published
The Book of Paradise as a stateless person in Paris. He later moved to England and then the U.S. before settling in Israel, where he died in 1969.
Robert Adler Peckerar, a translator and cultural historian, is the Executive Director of Yiddishkayt, the West Coast's premier Yiddish cultural organization and the CEO of the Topa Institute, an intercultural arts and education center based in the Ojai Valley, California. He lives in Southern California with his family.
