Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Joseph Buloff (1899-1985) had a tumultuous life. He was born in Vilna, Lithuania, performed all over Europe with the Vilna Troupe, joined the Yiddish Art Theater in New York, directed the Jewish Literary and Dramatic Society in Chicago. He performed in 225 Yiddish plays and dozens of plays on Broadway, appeared in 33 movies and TV shows and wrote two books. The library received recently a copy of one of them, “From the old marketplace: A memoir of laughter, survival, and coming of age in Eastern Europe.” The library journal described it as,

“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.”

I attempted and failed to find a quotable paragraph from the book itself for this entry. It is so action driven; it has so little descriptive only paragraphs that without context it did not make sense to copy any of it. Nevertheless to familiarize yourself with Buloff’s style, to wet your appetite, to invoke Chagall’s imagery and to honor my father-in-law, here is a segment from page 75,

Inspired by his flattery, I began to sweep the bow up and down as if flapping a wing and, with the fingers of my other hand, gripped the neck of invisible violin, which now began to rattle and gasp as if choking from an excess of rapture. Eyes closed in deep concentration, I saw Paganini move his hand out of the silvered glass and place it tenderly upon my flushed brow. “From now on,” he said, “your name is Paganini the Third, and I proclaim to the whole marketplace and to the whole city that neither the First nor the Second but the Third is the real Paganini, the truest and greatest of them all.”