"The Streetoffers an unsentimental portrait of Eastern European Jewish life, with none of the Shubert Alley schmaltz ofFiddler on the Roofor the mythopoeic grandeur of Isaac Bashevis Singer's fictions. . . . Rabon speaks to us today with immediacy and power, in this memorable novel about a vanished world quite like our own."--New York Newsday

A master novelist of city life, Israel Rabon describes inThe Streetthat peculiar moment in recent history--Eastern Europe between world wars. Day to day reality had shattered into pieces, yet people still seemed empowered with an unearthly optimism. His characters include a tubercular clown, a suicidal poet and his handsome young wife, a circus wrestler, and an ex-soldier who finds employment reading aloud the titles at a movie theatre for an illiterate audience. The eerie power of this book lies in its unerringly accurate depiction of human frailty.