The Book of Paradise

‘Itzik Manger’s novel strikes an utterly distinctive note in modern fiction-a high-spirited amalgam of whimsy, fantasy, and satire, all of it anchored in a rich sense of the folklore, belief system, and social behavior of East European Jewry before modernity. The book is a delight to read, and it is well-served by Robert Adler Peckerar’s lively, colloquially vivid translation from the Yiddish’ - Robert Alter

‘There is something joyous about Manger’s playful language’ - The Jewish Chronicle

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.

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