The Book of Paradise

The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains in a new translation. On being expelled from Paradise young Samuel Abba pulls 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.