The Street - Softcover

Israel Rabon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 094142345X ISBN 13: 9780941423458

Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990

Synopsis

"The Street offers an unsentimental portrait of Eastern European Jewish life, with none of the Shubert Alley schmaltz of Fiddler on the Roof or the mythopoeic grandeur of Isaac Bashevis Singer's fictions. . . . Rabon speaks to us today with immediacy and power, in this memorable novel about a vanished world quite like our own."--New York Newsday

A master novelist of city life, Israel Rabon describes in The Street that peculiar moment in recent history--Eastern Europe between world wars. Day to day reality had shattered into pieces, yet people still seemed empowered with an unearthly optimism. His characters include a tubercular clown, a suicidal poet and his handsome young wife, a circus wrestler, and an ex-soldier who finds employment reading aloud the titles at a movie theatre for an illiterate audience. The eerie power of this book lies in its unerringly accurate depiction of human frailty.

About this title

About the Author

Born in the Polish village of Govorchov in 1900, the son of a widowed rag peddler, the Yiddish writer Israel Rabon published two novels, The Street (1924) and Balut (1934), as well as two volumes of poetry, Behind the World's Fence (1928) and Lider (1938). In 1941 Rabon was seized by the Nazis and presumably killed.

Reviews

A homeless Jewish soldier encounters other lost souls while wandering the streets of post-WW I Poland in this tale of despair, first published in Yiddish in 1928. ``Rabon has remarkably created a character who responds acutely to the life of the city from which he is isolated, and this sensitivity adds beauty to the otherwise harsh, strange landscape of this striking novel,'' said PW.

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 094142345X
• ISBN 13: 9780941423458
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200