The Family Mashber

First time in Paperback The Family Mashberis a protean work: a tale of a family divided a laBrothers Karamazov, a detailed and panoramic picture of an Eastern European town and its people, a social satire, a kabbalistic allegory, a brilliantly innovative fusion of modernist art and traditional storytelling, a tale of weird humor and mounting tragic power whose margins are embellished with a host of uncanny and fantastical figures drawn from daily life and the depths of the unconscious. Above all,The Family Mashberis an account of a world in crisismashbermeans crisis in Hebrewtorn between the competing claims of family, community, business, politics, the individual conscience, and an elusive God. At the center of the book are three brothers: the successful businessman Moshe, at the height of his fortunes as the story begins, but whose luck has taken a permanent turn for the worse; the religious seeker Luz, who for all the otherworldliness he aspires to finds himself ever-more caught up in worldly affairs; and the idiot savant Alter, whose reclusive existence is tortured by fear and sexual desire. Through the story of the three brothers, Der Nister explores and illuminates the nature of sexuality, the life of the spirit, and the claims of the world. The novel is also haunted by the enigmatic figure of Sruli Gol, a drunk, a profaner of sacred things, an outcast, who nonetheless finds his way into every door and may well hold the key to the brothers' destinies. The Family Mashberis an eerie, luminous, wildly inventive work of fiction that is one of the great masterpieces of Yiddishand modern Europeanliterature.

Der Nister (1884—1950) was the pen name used by Pinhas Kahanovitch, a Yiddish author, philosopher, translator, critic, and key figure in modernist literature in Kiev in the 1920s. In 1921, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Der Nister left Russia and settled in Germany, where he published two collections of stories. In 1927, he returned to the Soviet Union, where his work was declared reactionary by the Soviet regime and its literary critics. He was arrested in 1949 and died in a Soviet prison hospital in 1950.

David Malouf is a novelist and poet. His novel The Great World was awarded both the Commonwealth Prize and Remembering Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has received the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

Leonard Wolf is best known for his authoritative works on terror literature and film. He is also a much-published writer of poetry, fiction, social history, and biography, and a leading translator of Yiddish literature. He lives in New York City.