The Street: A Yiddish Novel from Between the World Wars

by Israel Rabon, Leonard Wolf (Translator)

" 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.

Genres: Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

Reviews

[Galvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book that gives a look into the plight of a common soldier released post-WWI Poland. Not only is it a good tale of a soldier's difficulty in re-assimilating into civilian society, it also helps you understand why communism seemed to be such a light in the dark for the common man at this time.

[Kathy Karpinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surreal. Dark. Modernist Eastern European lit. AND there's a circus in it!

[Madeleine Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing read. This fictional story of a homeless soldier is so well written it could very well be about a real person. I was entranced. It was a book I could not put down. I highly recommend it.