Birds speak Yiddish, trees dream, walking canes converse, an egg can give eternal life, a person can fly with the feather of a Bird of Paradise, an angel is inexplicably exiled from Heaven, a pious rabbi’s soul is imprisoned in a stone… Seemingly lighthearted fables can also be seen as dark allegory; with themes of wandering, suffering, victimization, helplessness, and the fickleness of Fate (or the Universe, or God). These haunting, beautifully crafted short-short stories are prose poems: using striking visual images, metaphor and fantasy, they collectively draw a biography, not only of an individual, but of an entire generation that was uprooted, scattered and scarred.
Tsvi Eisenman is one of the last native writers of Yiddish, but this work is startlingly, refreshingly modern. He can be compared to O. Henry, Saki, Guy de Maupassant, and Shirley Jackson in his ability to weave a lovely vignette that recasts itself with an ironic twist. In his introduction, the translator, Barnett Zumoff, decodes, explains, and analyzes the individual tales. The ‘Very Briefly’ author’s autobiography is also helpful in understanding how his own experiences color the work.
