Pages from a Charred Notebook

Book excerpt: This book is an entrancing collection of charming, fabulous tales written in a masterly, unique style. Some of the tales are on Jewish themes: Israel, the Holocaust, and the author's eventful and troubled life as a wartime refugee from Poland and an immigrant to Israel; others are drawn from his fertile imaginings about kings and queens, monsters, and strange mystical visions of existence. In 1996, the work was awarded the Rosenfeld Prize for Yiddish Literature. The citation reads in part: His is a unique voice in Yiddish literature. He says a lot in very few words and speaks loudly with a quiet voice. He looks at both life and death with the wide-open eyes of a child. His language is rhythmical and his stories read like ballads. They seem, at first, like naive children's stories but they contain great wisdom and even greater sadness. Eisenman's truly wonderful Yiddish original has been given a superb, idiomatic translation by Barnett Zumoff, who has also published translations of works by Sholem Aleichem, Jacob Glatstein, Abraham Sutzkever, Rajzel Zychlinsky, and Chaim Lieberman.