Syracuse University Press, , pages. Not for working, of course, but for shuffling cards. Karpinowitz writes, too, about the women who tolerated and fed these men. Money is scarce in his stories, not least in the story of a man who wants to create beautiful currency for a future Jewish state. Like many other characters in Vilna My Vilna , Lunski was a real person.
So was Mr. Karpinowitz lived in the Soviet Union during the war, then briefly returned to Vilna before emigrating to the new state of Israel, where he lived until his death in Vilna has become Wilno, a Polish city, after centuries of being Lithuanian or Russian. Mintz has done more than translate these rich sketches of a city in transition during the interwar years.
Finally, she has added two pieces of memoir that Karpinowitz wrote long after his stories, but they cast a warm light back:. Where else in the world could you find jokers like the guys in Vilna? The hucksters on Daytshe Street with their expressions, their jokes, and their ridiculing of the entire respectable world. They could convince a peasant to buy a tuxedo jacket to match a pair of striped pants.
Only in Vilna could those oddballs have paraded around in all their outlandishness. Every Vilna Jew possessed their own peculiarities, so they could understand the fantasies of others. Vilna now Vilnius has been the capital city of Lithuania since the late Middle Ages, and over the centuries it has seesawed from Poland to Russia and back.
In the 18th century Vilna became a hub of Jewish intellectual, spiritual and cultural life within the Russian empire. When Poland achieved independence it included Vilna. Martha Roth moved to Canada a year after George W. Bush was reelected in her native U.
