This collection from one of the great writers of Europe's Jewish diaspora shows the heat of individual passions blazing out against the levelling forces of history. In stories that move back through time from the First World War to Ancient Rome, we encounter heroes and bookworms, visionaries and gadabouts, patriarchs and rebel children - all tied together across the centuries by their faith and by the intensity with which they live and die.
In 'Mendel the Bibliophile', a bookseller's obsession with his wares blinds him to the progress of war and the threat it poses to his own life. Monomania is also an overpowering force in 'Downfall of the Heart', in which an aging father cannot accept his daughter's embrace of new freedoms. 'The Miracles of Life' is a masterfully ironic tale, which plays with the tension between faith and morality, society and individual, against the backdrop of 16th-century Antwerp and the Dutch rebellion against Spanish rule. 'In the Snow' sees a Jewish community in medieval Eastern Europe fleeing the violence of a Christian sect. And in the longest piece in the collection, the novella The Buried Candelabrum, we go all the way back to the ancient world, where the recovery of a sacred seven-branched candlestick stolen during the sack of Rome will become a young boy's life's mission.
