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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains, in a new translationSamuel Abba is a young angel who has just been expelled from Paradise. As a result of a crafty trick, Samuel has retained his memory of his previous life. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world.Witty, playful and slyly profound, The Book of Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers. Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, it is a comic masterpiece that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane.
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Contents
Introduction
The Kaddish is more than a hymn of divine praise and mourning. In a mix of Aramaic and Hebrew, it is the most recited liturgical poem in the Jewish tradition, punctuating prayer services and forming the textual heart of the rituals of Jewish mourning. In Yiddish, kaddish is also a term of endearment for sons, who are destined, one day, to recite the Kaddish at the graves of parents over the course of days and months of prescribed mourning, and thereafter whenever called upon. When Yiddish was the everyday language of the majority of Ashkenazic Jews in the world, parents affectionately called their boys “my kaddish” or “darling little kaddish”, a gentle, perhaps barely conscious, reminder of mortality and the sacred obligations of memory and memorializing.
The poet and writer Itzik Manger (pronounced with a hard “g” as “Monger”) was born nearly with the dawn of the twentieth century, in the spring of 1901, in what is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine, and was then Czernowitz, capital of Bukovina, the easternmost province of Habsburg Austria–Hungary. He would be kaddish not only unto his mother and father, but, as it would turn out, unto his culture and his mother tongue. Manger’s parents were born in the neighbouring province of Galicia. His mother, Chava Woliner Manger, was the daughter of a family of upholsterers from the city of Kolomea (now Kolomyia). His father, Hillel Helfer-Manger, was a tailor who came from a small town, Stopchet (now Stopchativ), just across the River Prut, about ten miles to Kolomea’s south. Manger was raised in the multilingual, multi-ethnic foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, moving between Czernowitz, Kolomea and Stopchet, where rivers and mountain passes marked out historical, ever-shifting boundaries between empires and nations and cradled a unique hodgepodge of local languages and peoples.
The streets of Manger’s childhood Czernowitz resonated with a polyphony of tongues, including the official Austrian German (as well as the local Bukovinian dialect of it), Yiddish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Armenian, Polish, Hungarian and Romani. This diverse provincial capital proved a fertile breeding ground for poets and writers, Jewish ones in particular. In the city’s schools, students recited Goethe and Schiller, and absorbed—through study or cultural practice—the Jewish sacred texts and liturgy from antiquity.
Even though he was one of the most popular and widely read Yiddish poets of his day, to date there are no monuments to Manger in his home town. There are some, though, to his contemporaries, including the Jewish German-language poets Rose Ausländer (1901–88) and Paul Celan (1920–70), who would both go on writing poetry in the former imperial language even after the shift of borders following the First World War. Ausländer and Manger were, in fact, childhood friends. The younger Celan grew up an admirer of Manger. The Czernowitz-born American Yiddish poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman (1920–2013) once recalled a strange encounter with Paul Celan in 1947. She remembered how, on Vienna’s Seegasse, significantly the site of the city’s ancient, enormous Jewish cemetery, Celan approached her and—out of the blue—declared, “Itzik Manger is the greatest Yiddish poet”, and then disappeared, without a goodbye, “like an apparition”.
Manger’s poetic reputation was based on his unique blending of multiple cultural elements in his work, an admixture he called Literatorah—an apt portmanteau joining together the two dominant voices that informed his work. On the one hand was Literature, the high culture of European letters, and on the other Torah, which is far more than the biblical scripture and includes the oral and written Holy Law, as well as an entire Jewish way of looking at the world. Manger’s Literatorah was not a simple amalgam of the literary traditions of Christian Europe and the Jewish people, but rather a deep engagement with the complex interfusion of lives and letters that once flourished in the places where Manger lived and wrote.
As Manger began to reach his poetic stride in Romania towards the end of the 1920s (Bukovina had, by then, become part of the Kingdom of Romania), he achieved distinction as a new type of “poet of the people” who bridged the Jewish folkloric traditions of wandering troubadours and itinerant balladeers with the legacy of restless, rambunctious and hard-drinking European poets from Anacreon to Villon. Arriving in Warsaw late in 1928, he fashioned himself as a kind of rabbinic Rimbaud; his work staked out a rebellious ground in Jewish poetry, centred around themes of benkshaft, profound melancholic longing, and hefker, which indicates a sense of both unbridled ownerlessness and abandonment. In the teeming Jewish metropolis, Manger deepened his engagement with particularly Jewish source material in a highly idiosyncratic and modernist manner.
After publishing two sparkling volumes of poetry, Manger more fully embraced the cultural world view of Warsaw’s pre-eminent Jewish literary figure, I.L. Peretz (1852–1915), who had died thirteen years before Manger’s arrival there. One of the central ideas that Peretz advocated in his influential salon was that all historical strata of Jewish literature accumulated to form a tell, an archaeological mound. Digging into this tell offered Jewish culture-makers a historical trove to plunder and draw on for innovative use. The work of excavation carried on an ancient practice, participating in creation with these texts in a way that kept them ever present, in every generation. The Midrash, the creative exegetical mode of reading holy scripture compiled by rabbinical sages well over a millennium ago, is a striking example of this type of continuous engagement and would serve as Manger’s primary raw material.
On the surface, aggadah—the classical rabbinical storytelling mode—may resemble biblical storytelling of a non-Jewish variety. The entire genre of Christian children’s religious literature is based on reworking the Bible’s central characters and themes into easily digestible moralizing tales. But aside from some similar names and events, there is little that connects even the most whimsical classical rabbinical literature with, forgive the comparison, an animated VeggieTales video in which a tomato and an asparagus spear riff on “Josh and the Big Wall”.
The sages’ tales, as Dina Stein, scholar of rabbinical literature and folklore, has eloquently described, are overtly and intricately intertextual. Aggadic literature is uniquely given to characteristic self-reflexivity because the tales are first and foremost devoted to rhizomal networks of internal literary allusion. As Stein notes: “the seams of the rabbinic cloth are, at least partly, sewn on the outside, making visible the process by which it was made.”* Manger mines in the same literary vein, although sacrilegiously, extracting the raw ore of classical tales and their ancient scriptural sources for modern refinement. Like the rabbis of old, Manger proudly points at the textual seams, but rather than sewing them, the mischievous son of a tailor revels in their unravelling.
When Manger began to conceive his first long-form prose work in the mid-1930s, the radical, anti-Semitic right-wing movement led by Octavian Goga and A.C. Cuza was rising in Romania. Watching in distress from the Polish capital, where the virulently anti-Semitic Endecja movement was also gaining traction, Manger began writing The Book of Paradise. His first attempt at setting lyrical poetry in prose, while still including a good number of poems throughout, The Book of Paradise was the culmination of years of writing his own poetic volumes of “midrash”. His novel was initially serialized throughout the spring and into the summer of 1937 in twenty-eight instalments as The Marvellous Life Story of Samuel Abba Aberwo in the popular leftist Warsaw-based newspaper Naye Folkstsaytung. Excerpts also appeared in Manger’s home-town paper, Czernowitzer Bletter, whose editor lauded the new work as a “description of our times in grand style, a reflection of the tragic and the grotesque of our turbulent times”. Turbulent times indeed. With the descent of central Europe into fascism and the accompanying ascent of the violent anti-Jewish political Right in Poland and Romania, the world appeared to be on an inexorable, postlapsarian decline. Manger’s novel probed the roots of a peculiar, universal type of 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.
Late in the summer of 1937, as Samuel Abba’s adventures were still hitting the news-stands, Manger, together with his partner, Rachela Auerbach, returned to Romania for what would be the last time. They stayed until autumn, visiting his home town, the Carpathians, as well as his former haunts in Iași, before heading on to Bucharest. Just two months after Manger and Auerbach returned to Warsaw, the Goga–Cuza government came to power and began the process of stripping Jews who were born outside the pre-war borders of the Romanian Kingdom of their basic rights. To extend his Warsaw residency permit, which was set to expire at the end of April 1938, Manger needed to acquire proof of employment and to renew his passport. After getting the requisite credentials from Yiddish newspapers in Romania and the United States, Manger set off to the Romanian consulate. There he learnt that he was no longer a citizen. With a passport valid for only ten more days, Manger boarded the overnight train to leave the city he had inhabited for a decade—a time he would describe as the loveliest in his life—to become a stateless person in Paris.
From his Parisian exile, Manger negotiated the contract for the publication of The Book of Paradise, which Auerbach signed on his behalf in Warsaw, and he revised the work for release as a single volume in February 1939. His precarious state—legal, financial, physical and psychological—left its stamp on the final draft of the book. The deceptively outlandish and childlike tone, characteristic of all of Manger’s work, with its vacillation between elusive joy and melancholy, now intensified the novel’s peaks of delight and troughs of despair. The outbreak of the war also amplified his insecurity and anxiety, leaving him dependent on friends and supporters for the rest of his life, first in France, then in England, the United States and, finally, Israel, where he died in 1969.
Manger returned once, if only briefly, to an entirely different Poland in the spring of 1948, almost exactly ten years after he had left. The real invitation to visit Poland, he said, was not from the official organizations responsible for the dedication of the memorial at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, for which he had ostensibly come, but rather “from my dead readers in Poland. I was drawn here to visit them. Amongst the nations of the world, people journey to the graves of their poets, but now the Jewish poet must make the pilgrimage to the graves of his people.”†
As I was finishing work on The Book of Paradise, I spent some time in Bukovina and Galicia, tracing Manger’s youthful footsteps—in Chernivtsi, Stopchativ and Kolomyia, all found today in Ukraine. This was a few months before the Russian invasion in February 2022 and, although there was a lot of public sabre-rattling, all felt cool and crisp and peaceful. The trees of the Carpathian autumn were vibrant with golds and reds, and pools of mist filled the twilight in the towns and country meadows. My thoughts turned to Manger, who never returned here. Perhaps he wanted to preserve the landscape as it was that last day he saw it, so that it and the throngs of people who had crowded the railway station to bid him farewell in October 1937 could live on endlessly in memory and in poetry.
For his last two decades, Manger published sporadically, acutely aware of the absence of an audience. A poem published in his final collection, Stars in the Dust (1967), is divided into two parts. In one we encounter the bereft Prophet Elijah beside the ash and bone at the crematorium of Majdanek, where the ancient messianic messenger strokes the ash heap with his sad fingers:
And he will stand here all alone,
With dishevelled beard and payess,
An eternal memorial stone.
And against this image is an “Evensong”, in which we find the poet, who sits with a glass of wine, struggling to write, his days endlessly slipping into shadow and shine:
Silent evening. Murky gold.
A grey Jew past his prime
Piously prays away the dust
From fairs of days gone by—
May just a mumble off his tongue
Come to me in rhyme.
Manger’s late poetry remains devoted to a credo he adopted early in his career: that through the transformation of the everyday into poetry, people, objects and landscapes transcend their earthly trappings to become divine. And the divine, as the Kaddish insists, will be forever magnified, lauded and exalted.
robert adler peckerar
* Dina Stein, Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, p. 4. See also Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
† Marian Gid (I. Moskowski), “Poet Itzik Manger Visits Warsaw”, Forverts, 29 May 1948, p. 6.
A Preface
It strikes even me as a bit odd to have such a gloomy prelude to my happiest book.
But maybe it must be so? At the edge of the abyss, laughter becomes even more audacious.
Stripped of citizenship from my Romanian homeland, far away from my beloved Jewish-Polish enclave, left hanging with no passport, no visa between borders, I bow deep in this grotesque pose before my esteemed audience and present my dear Samuel Abba Strewth and the extraordinary story of his life.
The Book of Paradise is actually the first part of what I imagine to be a trilogy. The Book of the Earth and The Book of the World of Chaos will perhaps be written someday.
Still, quite a few of my most intimate experiences are found in this book of joyous abandon, much of my own life, suffering and love.
I dedicate this volume here to myself, in memory of my lonely days and nights, wandering the streets and boulevards of Paris.
The happiest moments in this eternal abandon were those spent in nocturnal watering holes with the shadows of French troubadours, those derelict singers that, perhaps, even in their own homeland, were no less lonely than I.
And that is but small consolation. But now, let’s not dispirit this happy tale of Samuel Abba Strewth.
Samuel Abba, the floor is yours!
itzik manger
Paris, January 1939
THE BOOK OF PARADISE
THE MARVELLOUS LIFE OF SAMUEL ABBA STREWTH
1
My Last Day in Paradise
The time i spent in Paradise was the loveliest in my entire life. Even now I feel a pang in my heart and tears fill my eyes when I think back on that joyful time.
Often, I’ll shut my eyes and relive those happy years. Those years, gone forever, will never return. Unless, of course, the Messiah comes.
In such minutes of reverie I forget that my wings have been clipped and that I was dispatched to the other world. I spread out my arms and try to fly. Only when I fall to the ground and feel the pain in my bruised nether parts do I remember that it’s all gone and wings belong only to the creatures of Paradise.
So I’ve decided to record everything that has happened to me, both before and since my birth. I do not wish to write all this down simply to beguile the disbelievers, but rather to console myself. I know that many people have recounted their own lives in the various languages of the world. I have read a hundred or so such life stories myself and I must admit that they can really put you off. At every step I sense human pride doing the talking and that it is all, at bottom, lies. Lies that paint oneself in rosier and others in darker colours. Such a life story is nothing more than drivel, which sets out to pull the wool over the eyes of the fool who believes it and, at bottom, the selfsame writer.
Rather, I will tell everything just so, as it was. I won’t alter a single hair. I don’t want to delude anyone into thinking I’m some kind of holier-than-thou saint. God forbid! I’ve made my share of mistakes and done some good, too, and I’ll admit where I have strayed and also, wherever I have done the right thing, I’ll accurately tell how and what and when.
I know that many people will ask me: how can it be that a person can remember all that happened before he was born with such accuracy? They, my questioners, will even offer evidence that such a thing is not possible. Everyone knows, after all, that before a person is born an angel comes and gives a flick to the nose and, with this very flick, all that happened before is immediately forgotten, even the Holy Torah that the angels had taught this newly birthed being before being brought into this wicked world.
Those who assert this would be correct. That’s really how it is. So it happens with every human being who comes into this world. An angel really does flick everyone’s nose and everyone indeed forgets everything. But a miracle happened to me, an extraordinary miracle. And I want to tell of this miracle straight off so that I can spare folks the trouble of whispering their doubts in each other’s ears that this Samuel Abba Strewth is just talking nonsense, stretching out lies like a housewife rolling dough for noodles.
On the day that some angel signed off on sending me to the Earth, I was just sitting there, under a Paradise tree, taking pleasure in the canaries singing amongst its branches, as it is written in the Psalms. By the way, I should tell you that compared to Paradise canaries, Earth birds are just chickenshit. In the first place, Paradise canaries are twenty times bigger and they sing like, well, you simply can’t describe it in any human language. Such a thing must be heard by your own ears in order to understand the distinction.
It was twilight. Our Talmud teacher, Mr Meyer Scabies, an angel with hefty, dark-grey wings, left class for the late-day prayer in the angels’ synagogue and, in the meantime, the students all took off. Some played Red Rover with other little angels and some were telling tales of pirates. I went to my favourite Paradise tree to listen to the canaries sing.
I admit: the song of the Paradise canaries was my greatest weakness. When they were singing, I forgot everything else in the world.
So there I was, lying under the Paradise tree. The canaries sang, enormous butterflies flitted amidst the Paradise grass, playing tag. When I speak of the Paradise butterflies, you shouldn’t think that these are just some run-of-the-mill butterflies that you see on the Earth in summertime. If you think that, you’re grossly mistaken. A Paradise butterfly is nineteen times as big as an earthly one. Each butterfly has its own different colour. One may be blue, another green, another red, another white, another black. In brief, how could I even take stock of all the colours when human language possesses not nearly enough words for all the colours in Paradise?
I had just laid myself down under the tree when I suddenly heard a voice, a familiar voice, that sounded like a silver bell: “Samuel Abba! Samuel Abba!”
I looked around and saw my friend Little Pisser, a clever angel with wise, dark eyes. As usual, his mouth was smeared with jam. He flitted over to me with his delicate bright wings and descended at my feet.
“What’s up, Little Pisser? What’s happened? Tell me quick or else I’ll burst!”
Little Pisser wiped the sweat from under his little wings and whispered in my ear: “Samuel Abba, it’s awful. I learnt that today you’ll be sent to Earth. Your fate is to become a human being, you get what I’m saying?—A human being!”
My heart started pounding: thump-thump-thump.
“What are you talking about, Little Pisser? Who told you that? Where did you hear it?”
So Little Pisser told me how he just happened to be flying by the Paradise tavern, Righteous Noah’s Inn. In the pub sat the angel Simon Bear, the biggest souse of all the angels. “He had already downed ninety-six shots and was swearing a blue streak—at whom, I don’t know,” Little Pisser explained. “But I saw that he was mad. He was being sent on assignment. He was to guide you to Earth and flick your nose and make you forget everything: Paradise, the Holy Word you’ve learnt, and even me, your friend Little Pisser, too.”
At that, Little Pisser started to cry. His tears rolled down on to my right hand. They were gigantic tears, and hot.
My friend Little Pisser’s tears moved me to tears. I patted his head and tried to console him. “Don’t cry, Little Pisser, who cares what a drunken lout of an angel blathers about in a barroom? Come on, let’s see if he tries to take me. I’ll rip out his red beard. I’ll scratch his face. I’ll take a bite out of his red nose, as sure as you see me here!”
Little Pisser, however, could not calm down. “Don’t you know what a bandit he is, this Simon Bear? He’s a butcher,” blubbered Little Pisser.
I knew that what Little Pisser was saying was the truth. Everyone trembled before the angel Simon Bear. He was almost never sober. Falling into his hands was worse than into the flames of hell. Yet they had picked him to be the one to accompany the children who were to be born and to give the famed flick to the nose.
I was quivering like a fish in water. I imagined how this drunk would take me by the hand. If I didn’t go nicely, then he’d hoist me over his shoulders. And there we’d be, on the frontier of Paradise, and I could hear his drunken voice: “Gimme that honker there, ya punk. Lemme flick it and then scram!”
Everyone was afraid of this flick. It was even scarier than being born on Earth. Not just one child has had the misfortune of being flicked by this drunken angel. If you ever see some snub-nosed kid on Earth, you ought to know that he got that from an extra-forceful flick on the nose delivered by the angel Simon Bear.
“But what can we do about it, Little Pisser?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” Little Pisser answered sadly. “Your fate is sealed and what’s decided is decided. There’s no evading the hands of Simon Bear, even with eighteen heads you couldn’t. What I mean is, it would be for the best if you’d…”
“What? What?” I asked, looking him straight in the eyes.
“… If you’d go nicely, without resisting and without tears. Simon Bear detests insubordination, he detests crying. If you cry you could end up receiving a flick to the nose so hard that you might, God forbid, wind up without any nose at all. And then what a face you’d have, goddamn that Simon Bear.”
Little Pisser made it clear: there was no escaping Simon Bear. The whole time Little Pisser was speaking I held my hand to my nose, which deplored with all its heart the sad fate that it might, God forbid, meet, and, deep in my heart, I beseeched the Almighty to preserve and protect it.
The entire time that I was silently praying that the Almighty would preserve and protect my nose from all prospective peril, Little Pisser was sitting beside me in the grass and scratching his forehead with his finger to indicate that he was thinking something. His wise, dark eyes suddenly gave a flash. Anytime Little Pisser thought of something, his eyes would gleam. “You know what I think, Samuel Abba?”
“What, Little Pisser?”
He looked all around to see if anyone could overhear and then he whispered in my ear: “Over in our cellar we have some holy wine that my dad was given once as medicine. I’ll give you that bottle to bring with you on your way.”
“What do you mean you’ll give it to me to bring on my way?” I wondered. “It’s yours, isn’t it? What use would it be to me?”
“I see you really need it all spelt out for you,” Little Pisser smiled. “What’s so hard to understand, I ask you? You give the bottle to the angel Simon Bear, which he’ll gladly take, then he won’t give you—well, you’ll have to work it out with him—a powerful punch on your nose.”
“What do you mean, Little Pisser?” I cried out loud. “Do you mean you’ll pinch the bottle? What about ‘Thou shalt not steal’?”
“Oh, my dim-witted birdbrain,” Little Pisser laughed. “Don’t you know that ‘Thou shalt not steal’ applies to people, not angels? Go on then, show me where it’s written in the Bible that the Lord of Hosts has commanded the angels not to steal!? Maybe in the Book of Numbskulls?”
I realized my friend was far smarter than me and that he was right. Yet I still didn’t fully understand. Let’s suppose that I gave the bottle of holy wine to the angel Simon Bear and, in return, Simon Bear would only give me a mild flick on the nose—forgetting everything that happened to me in Paradise and who I am would still be a terrible shame.
Little Pisser made it clear that he understood what I was thinking and took out of his pocket a wad of clay that he moulded in his hands until it formed a nose. Then he handed it to me and said: “While Simon Bear is drinking the holy wine, stick this clay nose on your face. When he flicks you, he’ll touch the clay and you’ll be left intact. Remember everything and be sure not to forget to tell the people on Earth that there’s a Little Pisser here in Paradise.”
He stood up, adjusted his wings, and in a loud voice said, “Come! Soon Simon Bear will be looking for you. It would be better if you go find him. Now let’s fly over to my place.”
And so we flew. It would be my last flight over Paradise with my dear friend.
It wasn’t long before we landed at the house where Little Pisser’s father Solomon-Zalman the tailor lived, an angel with a bulging Adam’s apple and eyes like a calf’s.
On the wall hung a sign and on it was painted an angel with patched wings, showing that Little Pisser’s dad was a botcher, that is, a patchmaker who repaired worn-out angel wings.
Little Pisser went into the house and I waited outside. Not long passed before he was back, and tucked under his wing was the holy wine. He handed me the bottle and said: “Here, take it, Samuel Abba, and fly straight away to the Righteous Noah! It would be far better for you to come to Simon Bear than for him to come to you.”
We hugged and kissed and then hugged and kissed some more, and who knows how long we would have stayed there if Little Pisser’s mom, the angel Hannah Deborah, hadn’t bellowed out the window, “Little Pisser, the tripe stew is getting cold. Come and eat!”
Again we embraced and wrapped our wings around each other. Little Pisser went into the house to eat dinner and I set off flying towards the Righteous Noah.
Paradise was pretty dark by now. The lamps were all burning in the houses where the angels lived with their families, bearded angels were poring over yellowed holy books. Fat angels with three-storeyed chins were mending shirts, young angel mothers were rocking cradles, sending their newly born angels off to sleep with a song:
Sleep little angel, my angel sweet;
Lovely little angel, go to sleep.
Lay to rest your fledgling wings,
And listen as your mama sings,
Ay-lu-lu…
As I flew I peeked into this window and that. I was terribly envious of all the young and old angels. They would get to sleep through the night, and when they woke up in the morning they would still be in Paradise. But me? Where would I be? Fortunately, the wind cooled the tears rolling down my cheek, and if it hadn’t been for that wind my tears would have seared a crater right into my face.
I touched down just in front of Righteous Noah’s tavern. I peered in through the window and saw a couple of everyday angels, the ones who toiled for the tzaddikim, the holy sainted ones, ploughing their fields, reaping the harvest, getting only insult and injury in return. They sat at the tables, drinking their whisky, smoking their peasant’s tobacco, and regularly letting jets of saliva spray from between their teeth on to the floor.
The angel Simon Bear sat to the side at a table, his red beard dishevelled, his eyes rolling back in his head. Clearly, he had already downed a good amount. As I caught sight of him my heart pounded with fear. This here is supposed to lead me out of Paradise, I thought. I simply could not get my head around it; I had to go inside.
For a good while I stood there indecisively, until I said to myself: “At some point the situation must be faced.” Then I marshalled all my courage and went in.
As soon as he saw me, he wanted to stand up and greet me with a “Welcome!” But he was far too drunk and his wings were all crumpled, so he just slumped back into his seat.
I went over and helped him straighten out his wings. If he can’t stand on his own two feet, he may as well fly. And it wasn’t long before we took off flying to the border that separates this world from the other.
We flew out on Thursday at ten in the evening and we got to the border on Friday just before the Sabbath candles were to be lit.
You should know that it wasn’t so easy to get there by flying. The angel Simon Bear, as I mentioned, was well stewed. He continually lost his sense of direction. We had been flying for three hours when the chimney of Righteous Noah’s came into view once more. Simon Bear was simply drawn back to the pub where he always spent his days and nights.
Very narrowly we avoided a bit of a catastrophe. The night in Paradise was pitch darkness, without even the trace of a star. Simon Bear had forgotten his lantern at the pub, so we were flying blind through the night, not knowing where in the world we were.
In the blackness, Simon Bear crashed into another angel. It was the dream angel, who was just flying off to Earth. This crash mangled one of the dream angel’s wings. Simon Bear let loose a torrent of curses at him and the dream angel started to cry. Now he wouldn’t be able to fly any further and the people on Earth would sleep the whole night dreamless. With his one good wing, he lamely headed over to Solomon-Zalman the patchmaker so that he could repair his damaged wing and we—that is, Simon Bear and I—continued on our way towards the border.
The crash sobered Simon Bear up a little. He took out his pipe, stuffed it full with peasant’s tobacco, struck a match and puffed as we flew on.
With every draw he took from his pipe a little glow blazed and, from time to time, we could just make out where we were in the world.
We flew past the Paradise mill, which stood on a hilltop open to all the winds that could turn its wings.
This mill inspired many tales told in Paradise. During the daytime it was a mill like all other mills. It ground wheat and rye, like any mill. But by night it was the haunt of devils and demons.
I know that you’re looking at me astounded: how could there be demons in Paradise? I wondered this myself when I heard about them. It was my friend Little Pisser who told me about it. I never saw these demons for myself, but every angel will tell you how the angel Raphael, Paradise’s local medic, one night went out to a patient. As he was passing by the mill he heard strange voices. Suddenly, he saw a long tongue sticking out through the window opening of the mill. The angel Raphael let out a yelp, prayed “Hear O Israel!” and fainted on the spot.
He was found at dawn, lying beside the mill, and they could barely get him to stir. From then on he was left with a severe defect. He stammered when he spoke; really it was such a pity.
We, that is, the angel Simon Bear and I, were still flying. We didn’t exchange a word between us. Whatever Simon Bear was thinking, I could not say. How could I know? But all that I thought and felt—all that, you see, I still can recall, and other memories still.
I thought about my friend Little Pisser, asleep now in his bed, all tucked in. His feet have kicked his blanket on to the ground. Even in sleep his impudence had no equal. He slept with his finger in his mouth. Who knows, perhaps he dreamt of me, his friend, whom he said goodbye to forever?
I wanted to cry. The sobs were already in my throat. But I remembered that Simon Bear detested tears, so I choked them back and let out a barely, barely audible sigh. By daybreak the angel Simon Bear had fully sobered up. The morning wind was sharp and cold. We both caught a chill and our teeth chattered.
“What goddamned cold!” the angel Simon Bear kept grumbling, and shivered his downy wings to warm up. With every shiver of those wings he looked back in the direction of Righteous Noah’s tavern.
I quickly understood that this was the right time to offer him the bottle of holy wine that my friend Little Pisser had given me.
“Simon Bear, sir,” I called, surprising myself with my boldness. “Simon Bear, a nice snifter of hooch would warm you up, no? What do you say, Simon Bear, sir?”
Upon hearing the word “hooch” the angel gave a clap with his coarse, downy wing and, in doing so, scared a few Paradise swallows that had just gathered to sing a paean to the Creator.
“Hooch, oh for a snifter of hooch,” he cried in a voice so loud that ten Paradise bunnies fainted out of fear and two lionesses went into labour.
I took out the bottle of holy wine from under my right wing and showed it to him. He somersaulted in the air with joy. At first I thought he had gone off his rocker.
I was terribly scared right then; having to deal with a mad angel is no picnic. Even today I shudder when I think of a young angel named Pearl, who went mad because of a disastrous love affair. Awful, it was just awful what she went through. All of Paradise was nearly upended by it.
But, to cut to the chase, as soon as Simon Bear saw the bottle in my hand he flew over, snatched it from my hand, pulled out the cork with his teeth and started guzzling. This holy wine, you should know, is pretty heavy stuff; each drop weighs about two and a half pounds.
“You know what, Samuel Abba,” he said to me, “let’s head down! We still have some time before we have to be at the border.” He took out his brass pocket watch and looked at its red face and then we descended on to a ploughed field of Paradise.
After the angel Simon Bear had fully gulped down the entire bottle, he became so cheerful that he pinched my cheek and roared: “You’re a fine lad, Samuel Abba.”
Then we flew on. We prayed the morning prayer in flight. At exactly five o’clock in the evening we arrived at the border.
At the border checkpoint, Simon Bear told me that I needed to stand on one foot and recite the entire Five Books of the Torah that I had learnt. I did what he asked. After I had finished he took out an enormous pair of scissors and cut off my wings.
“All right, now, pal, let’s have that honker and let me give it a flick…”
While Simon Bear had been clipping my wings, I had already stuck on the clay nose. He was so soused from the holy wine that he didn’t even notice.
“Simon Bear, sir,” I pleaded, “just a little flick, please Simon Bear!” I could see that he really liked me. He gave me such a light flick to the nose that I just barely felt it.
“Now vamoose, scram!”
I took a look behind me for the last time. I saw the entire Paradise panorama spread out before me, sparkling in glittering gold. I caught a last glimpse of my wings, lying on the ground.
“Farewell, Simon Bear, sir!” I said to the angel with the downy wings, and I headed down to Earth.
2
My Birth
My mama had a difficult labour. She wept and screamed and cursed my pop something awful: “Murderer!” “Bandit!” “Killer!” My pop wanly paced the room, tugging at his short black beard, not understanding why my mama was bestowing such lovely epithets on him.
He kept looking beseechingly at the midwife, Sosia-Deborah, a woman with bloated hands and a mannish voice. This midwife evidently grasped the meaning of his glances and kept grumbling under her breath: “How can I help it? See for yourself how this little fatso digs in his heels and refuses to be born.”
The midwife Sosia-Deborah wasn’t lying. She had tried a variety of methods already, attempting to coax me into the world by any means necessary, but to no avail. I heard her loud and clear but turned a deaf ear.
I scorned all her propositions. I scoffed at her dumb promises of the “golden watch” or “football” that she would present me with the moment I saw the light of day.
I could tell she was a great liar. In Paradise we had heard plenty of stories about her. My friend Little Pisser even warned me about her, saying that I shouldn’t trust her “as far as I could throw her”, and indicated that was not very far indeed.
