The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose by Manger Itzik

Author:Manger, Itzik [Manger, Itzik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480440777
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fiction

EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK OF PARADISE

1. My Last Day in Eden

The time that I spent in Paradise was the most beautiful of my life. To this moment, my heart aches and I get tears in my eyes when I remember those happy days.

Often I close my eyes and live again those splendid years, years that will never return—unless the Messiah should come.

In these dreaming moments, I even forget that my wings were shorn before I was sent down to this world. I spread my arms, and I try to fly … . Only when I have fallen to the ground and feel a sharp pain in my bottom do I remember that it’s all too late—that only the people in Eden have wings.

And for just this reason, I have decided to tell everything that befell me—both before my birth and after it. I shall describe it, not to deceive unbelievers, but to console myself. I know that many people have already described their lives in the various languages of the world. I myself have read a hundred such life histories, and I must confess that, at every point, I sensed in them human vanity—and falsehood, that falsehood which paints itself in rosy colors and paints others in the darkest black. Such life histories are nothing more than a deceiving stupidity that fools especially the authors themselves.

I, on the other hand, mean to tell everything as it was, without diminishing it by so much as a hair. I’m not out to convince anyone that I was particularly virtuous in Paradise. Good Lord, no. I did my share of harm as well as good. But in my story, where I have done harm, I will say so, and where I behaved well, I shall tell accurately just how it was.

I know that many people will ask me, “How come? How is it possible for a person to remember so precisely what happened to him before his birth?” Maybe such questioners will bring evidence that such a thing is impossible. Everyone knows that just before a person is born an angel comes and gives him a snap on the nose that makes him instantly forget all of his past—even the Torah, which he was studying just before his descent into the sinful world.

Those who make this point are right. Actually, that’s how it is. That is what happens to every person before he arrives in this world. An angel does give everyone’s nose a snap, and in fact, he does forget everything. But in my case, a miracle happened—a most remarkable miracle. And I will tell about this miracle at once, so that people will not go around whispering that I, Shmuel-Aba Abervo, am spinning a yarn or turning out lies.

On that day when I was turned over to the care of the angel who was to conduct me down to this world, I happened to be sitting under an Eden tree, enjoying the canaries that had “burst into song,” as the Scripture says.

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