From 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, though uneven, has all the gallant vitality of the vanished life of the marketplace.