From the Old Marketplace

Breadlines and cigarette shortages; anti-Semitism and ethnic animosity; shifting alliances and power struggles; pogrom, war, occupation, pestilence, revolution--all the disasters that in the first two decades of this century befell Vilnius, the old capital of Lithuania, tumble through the pages of Buloff's novel. In the Central/East European absurdist tradition (Mrozek, Gombrowicz, Olesha, Pil'niak, Grass) that jumbles unbearable reality into a phantasmagoric kaleidoscope, narrator Yosik relates the chaotic history of his spiritual home, Vilnius's old marketplace, and his own quirky Bildungsroman as an undersized Jewish boy with a glib tongue and vivid imagination. Wrenchingly funny and historically faithful, the book...has all the gallant vitality of the vanished life of the marketplace.Buloff, Joseph is the author of 'From the Old Marketplace', published 1991 under ISBN 9780674325036 and ISBN 0674325036.