Description
Fiction. Jewish Studies. Translated from the Hebrew by Margaret Birstein, Hana Inbar and Robert Manaster. Each of the twenty-one stories in AND SO IS THE BUS is an evocative "reporting" of Yossel Birstein's encounters with the daily riders of Jerusalem's many bus lines—housewives, Chasids, beautiful women, a blind man, a shoemaker, an angry daughter, bus drivers, and more. These scrupulous translations give us a feel for the tone of Birstein's Yiddishized Hebrew—a tone that in savoring personalities and conversations is empathically attuned to his chance meetings from one day to the next. "The world is moving on," says a character in Stolen Glance. "And after a short pause adds: 'And so is the bus.'"
"Yossel Birstein is a born flaneur. He is to Jerusalem as Baudelaire is to Paris, Dickens to London, Joseph Mitchell to New York."—Vivian Gornick
"Evocative stories—fortified with beguiling asides, full of unforgettable absurdities ... You might strain to see the world in Blake's grain of sand, but you see Birstein's world with clarity in a short hop aboard a Jerusalem bus."—Kirkus Reviews
"Yossel Birstein (1920-2003) escaped the Nazis in 1937, leaving the Polish shtetl Biala-Podolsk alone as a teenager for Melbourne, Australia. In 1950, he moved to Israel, where he continued to write in Yiddish for the rest of his life. AND SO IS THE BUS is composed of short and focused vignettes that build a unique portrait of Jerusalem through observations while traveling by bus around the city. The stories' narrator lacks omniscience and control. His encounters with a subject may be elongated by a red light or curtailed by a forthcoming bus stop, undermining conventional narrative and our confidence in what can be known. [...] When Birstein writes, 'I left my house to be among people. I joined a line for a bus at Jaffa Street,' we know that we haven't taken this ride to arrive at a destination, but to be part of humanity."—Howard Freedman
Author Bio
Yossel Birstein (1920-2003) was born in the small Polish town of Biala Podlask—at 16, he left for Australia to join his grandparents in Melbourne. Yossel married Margaret Waisberg, a young refugee from Germany, and served in the Australian army during WWII. In 1950, he, Margaret, and daughter Hana immigrated to Israel, where he worked as a shepherd in Kibbutz Gvat. Their second daughter, Nurit, was born in 1956. In 1970, the family moved to Jerusalem where Birstein became an archivist at the Hebrew University. He published novels and collections of stories—those of AND SO IS THE BUS (Dryad Press, 2016) are from Stories Dancing in the Streets of Jerusalem and Stories from the Realm of Tranquility. Among Birstein's numerous awards are the The Prime Minister's Prize twice (1987; 1999) and the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature (1991).
Author City: Jerusalem ISR