Synopses & Reviews
This novel is the saga in five parts of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, who grows up in Kolodetz, a small town near Lvov, which, when he is a boy, is part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but which subsequently belongs to Poland, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and then the Soviets again.
Isaac survives the absurdity and horror in Eastern Europe during the 20th century by pretending to be a fool. If this is an old Jewish art, Isaac is a consummate artist. He plays the fool all his life, from his boyhood in Kolodetz shtetl to the time when as an accused war criminal he finds himself in a gulag in Siberia. Inseparable from Isaac's life and story are the Yiddish jokes and fables of Kolodetz. These and the counsel of his dear friend, the rabbi and the chairman of the town's Atheists' Club, Shmuel Ben-David, sustain Isaac through two world wars, three concentration camps, and five motherlands.
In this homage to the grand tradition of Jewish storytelling, Wagenstein puts on record what is perhaps the central story of the last one hundred years and makes from it a sad, funny, warm and wise book.
Review
"Can one man be a Jew and a Nazi war criminal and a Soviet traitor? The jokes that pepper the text make you read them aloud....Great for reading groups." Booklist
Review
"A mock epic set in unambiguously epic times, Isaac's Torah embodies the humanistic notion that even the most unprepossessing life story should be bound like a Bible. Buoyed by a knockabout levity, like a shtetl cousin to Forrest Gump or Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, Wagenstein's picaresque story portrays Jewish humor and Jewish wisdom as inextricable twins and time-tested agents of survival." Akiva Gottlieb, The Nation (read the entire Nation review)
About the Author
Angel Wagenstein is a prizewinning Bulgarian novelist. Isaac's Torah was his first novel, and it has been translated into German, Russian, French, Czech, and now English. Farewell, Shanghai (Handsel Books, 2007), his third novel, won the Jean Monnet award in 2004.