Review of Itsik Manger’s Book of Paradise, transl. Robert Adler Peckerar

On a dark night in Paradise, the young angel Samuel Abba Strewth learns that he is intended to descend to earth and become a human child, a terrible fate which entails forgetting all of his life up to that point. But Samuel Abba and his best friend, a purehearted angel by the not-so-ethereal name of Little Pisser, hatch a scheme to avoid the flick on the nose that will knock all his knowledge from his head. The angel in charge of delivering new souls to babies is Paradise’s biggest alcoholic, and he is easily fooled with a bottle of wine and a clay nose, sending Samuel Abba to earth with his memories intact. In the person of a preternaturally talkative infant, the young angel is ready to scandalize the Jews of earth with tales of what their world-to-come is really like.

So opens Itzik Manger’s novel The Book Of Paradise, available from Pushkin Press in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar. In the novel, originally serialized in the Warsaw Naye Folkszaytung in 1937 and then published from Parisian exile in 1939, Manger and his mischievous narrator both look at the world of Eastern European Jewry with, as Adler Peckerar’s introduction puts it, the “peculiar… nostalgia that has us yearn for people and places who aren’t all that lovable when recalled in full detail—yet our love for them remains real, immense, and overwhelming nonetheless.”

The novel in itself is an expansion of the theme of Manger’s midrashic poems, which explore Torah stories in the context of modern shtetl life, highlighting (in love and sacrilege) the foibles of the Biblical characters. In Manger’s Paradise, angels plough fields for the tzaddikim, “getting only insult and injury in return”, spending their evenings at the tavern like any other downtrodden peasants, and mistreating their wives. The Jewish Paradise has borders (Turkish, i.e. Muslim, Paradise on one side, Christian Gentile Paradise on another) and a political party that favors immigration quotas. The Prophet Elijah resents modern people for not seeking his miracles, King David plays his resentful wives against each other and pursues the young female angels, and the Patriarchs argue in the street. For some, “no Paradise is paradise,” and even antisemitism rears its ugly head during an interlude across the border of Gentile Paradise.

Despite rabbinic apologetics for the Biblical characters, of course, Manger’s sacrilege is built on a firm foundation of Torah. Antisemitism is one thing, but Manger is most interested in the question of why Jews do not behave more fairly toward each other. A passionate social criticism can only be born from care for the society one criticizes and a deep familiarity with both its beauty and its flaws. Our guides through the memory of this imperfect world are the mischievous young angel Samuel Abba and the precociously wise Little Pisser, something of a social activist who points out the inequalities of life and encourages Samuel Abba to think more deeply about what he sees around him.

Through the curious eyes of a child-angel, even a flawed Paradise is full of wonder, and a frightening adventure is still an adventure when undertaken with a friend. Alongside the sad spectacle of King David’s neglected wife Bathsheba mourning her solitude, there is the poetry of nature’s beauty, a “Paradise sky strewn with stars as if they were rocking in the wind,” silver moonlight and sweet music. The poetic details of the setting highlight the petty pointlessness of the human (and angelic) squabbles taking place within it.

Manger may not have intended a queer reading of the relationship between the two young angels, but it’s incredibly tempting to make one. The line between the homosocial and the homoerotic can be blurry, and the friendship is passionate, the focus of Samuel Abba’s most wonderful memories and strongest emotions (including more than one scene of kissing and embraces). Little Pisser, the son of a poor angel tailor, has “wise, dark eyes” and “delicate bright wings”, and the soul of both a poet and an activist, able to see through the illusions of convention to the simple ways that the world could be improved (although his attempt to redistribute wealth in the form of a magic goat is foiled, perhaps a more mature Little Pisser can be imagined pairing his childish clear-sightedness with more structural planning). Samuel Abba is not one of those for whom no paradise is Paradise, because in his Paradise there is his best friend.

Adler Peckerar’s translation is idiomatic and readable, eschewing quaintness and literalism in favor of rendering Manger’s Yiddish expressions and puns into puns and expressions natural to English. A few of the angels’ Slavic-Yiddish-Hebrew names and nicknames have been rendered as Anglophone names common to the immigrant generation of Jews so that characters appear by the names of “Seymour” and “Barney,” a comedic touch that would be out of place in another text but feels here in keeping with the absurdity of Paradise hosting a cast of sweatshop workers.

The timing of The Book Of Paradise’s publication, overlapping Manger’s statelessness and flight from Eastern Europe, adds an additional layer to the narrative which renders the Jewish Pale of Settlement itself an inaccessible otherworld full of lost loves, lost beauty, and details we might be shocked to remember. Samuel Abba’s Paradise, like Jewish society or indeed any human society, is full of drunkards, womanizers, ethnic tensions, and poverty. But it is, crucially, very funny. Writing in 1939 without knowing the extent of what the next few years would hold, Manger introduces his novel by saying that “at the edge of the abyss, laughter becomes even more audacious.”

Remembering the lost world of Eastern European Jewry as complete with patriarchal oppression, sectarian squabbling, greed, drunkenness, and crime is indeed an audacious act. When Jewish authors write in English, we are often tempted to give in to the criticism of an invisible gentile audience and present them with an image of Jews who are impossible to confuse for the antisemite’s imagined Jew. In order to avoid the ever-shifting shadow of negative stereotype, we would have to write only virtuous Jews who are never anxious, never care about money, never commit any crime, never fall victim to sexual impulses, have no influence over government or media, and the list goes on. Indeed there comes a point when one wants to simply throw up one’s hands and admit that every negative stereotype of Jews is true, to the extent that it is true of human beings, and Jews are, after all, people.

Itzik Manger, standing on the edge of the abyss, places in the mouth of his protagonist a loving memory of the world that is no longer his, saying “the time I spent in Paradise was the loveliest in my entire life.” Yet what is it that was so lovely? Only the fullness of a complex existence. Samuel Abba and his beloved Little Pisser are not dwelling in a paradise of virtue and beauty, but a paradise of human experience. To accept that we don’t deserve to be painted in all our dimensions would be a disservice to the lives Jews lived in the past and a disservice to the lives we live now. One of the great gifts of Yiddish literature is that it expects a Jewish audience, and wastes little time on appeasing the imaginary gentile. Samuel Abba’s tale suggests that it is an act of love to see ourselves for what we are and how we could be better—a lesson we can all take with us.