A Jewish God in Paris

A Jewish God in Paris book cover

A Jewish God in Paris

Author(s): Michael Levitin (Author)

  • Publisher: Glas
  • Publication Date: 1 Mar. 2009
  • Edition: 1st
  • Language: English
  • Print length: 192 pages
  • ISBN-10: 5717200854
  • ISBN-13: 9785717200851

Book Description


…Somehow even the name of the book gives a vision of its author, of his outrageous iconoclasm to which all responded with enthusiasm. Francis Greene

I was lucky to have my play staged by Mikhail Levitin. What I saw was the work of a true master, a magical spectacle. Kurt Vonnegut

A philandering husband s guilty conscience after his latest love affair prompts him to take his wife and children to Paris in a final attempt to save his marriage. A precocious teenager with a passion for theatre discoveries a mysterious book in a secondhand bookshop and makes it his mission to find out more about it. 1917, a theatre director flees from the Bolsheviks abandoning his wife and daughter but returns, using all his ingenuity to survive the Party and the terrible hardships and privations that ensued.

Levitin s eccentric writing is distinguished by its strong element of the absurd, in the spirit of the absurdist writers of the 1920s. For him the absurd is a view of life from its seamier side, where so-called normal people appear insane and eccentricity is a way of preserving one s sanity.

Author s previous novel Total Indecency was short listed for the Russian Booker Prize.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

MIKHAIL LEVITIN, a prolific author and stage director whose Hermitage Theater has been a force in Moscow since the Brezhnev era, was born in Odessa in 1945. He mounted his first production (Mozart and Salieri) as a maverick seventh grader. Soon after that, he began a correspondence with the Moscow Chamber Theater actress Alisa Koonen, widow of the theater’s creator, Alexander Tairov. At the age of 16, he entered the State Institute of Theater Arts in Moscow (GITIS) where he stunned critics and the public alike with his degree production of Peter Weiss’ How Mr. Mockinpott Was Cured of His Sufferings. Later dramatizations by this uncontrollable” director including Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five further established Levitin’s name but kept the Soviet authorities from giving him his own theater. A three-hour extra¬vaganza based on then-banned works by Daniil Kharms (1982) and a breakthrough staging of an unfinished play by Yuri Olesha (1986) marked the start of his association with the Hermitage where, because of his being a Jew and a non-communist, his position as artistic director would not be made official until perestroika.
Throughout his directing life Levitin has written prose, biographical and autobiographical. Sploshnoye neprilichie (Total Indecency), his tribute to the futurist 1920s stage director Igor Terentiev, was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. His biography of Alexander Tairov came out in 2010.

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