The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains, in a new translation Samuel 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.

A masterpiece from one of Yiddish literature's true virtuosi, Moyshe Kulbak's satiric poem from 1933, Childe Harold of Dysna, appears here for the first time in a complete English translation. At once an exuberant celebration of Yiddish language and a searing indictment of capitalist excess, Kulbak's long poem follows the journey of its protagonist from small town Eastern Europe to the metropolis of Weimar Berlin. Drawing on his own experiences in Berlin in the early 1920s, Kulbak offers us a fresh perspective on life in interwar Berlin, and does so in one of the truly great pyrotechnic displays in Yiddish poetry. Robert Adler Peckerar's stunning translation conveys simultaneously Kulbak's verbal brilliance and his searing critique. This beautiful volume includes an introduction by Boris Dralyuk, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and stunning illustrations by Beynish.