The Book of Paradise

August 1, 2023

As everyone knows, unborn babies know all the secrets of the universe until an angel taps them on the upper lip, sending them into the world with empty minds and a little dent below their noses. All except Samuel Abba, who plays a trick on his drunken angel escort, sending him into the world brimming with jaw-dropping tales and songs of Paradise, which turns out to be full of the same longings, follies, class struggles, and petty nonsense of our bad old world below. Like an angelic Huck and Tom, Abba and his best pal Little Pisser wing their way around Heaven, playing pranks, spying on King David's philandering, and generally raising Cain. When the great Behemoth runs mad into the neighboring Gentile Paradise, the intrepid pair are sent on a perilous mission to negotiate its return with wily Saint Peter, encountering both antisemitism and romance among the Christians. VERDICT Freely employing American idioms, Peckerar's energetic translation captures the hilarity and pathos of Manger's prose and the lyricism of his songs, restoring this delightfully irreverent 1963 Yiddish classic to a contemporary readership.

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