One Hundred Nights in Old Jaffa
Menashe Levin’s major work is a kind of narrated film script set in Jaffa and New York and even briefly on the moon. Its cast of dozens includes an Arab goldfish vendor, a Macedonian belly dancer, a bewitched donkey, Professor X, Don Quixote, the Devil, the Devil’s wife, Josephine Baker and the hero Musta. Each chapter is a story that begins in a different Jaffa alley (hence the title), and is a celebration of everything that is exotic in the town. Linked by the characters, the various narratives are a parody of literature itself.
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“ Menashe Levin was a unique figure on the Hebrew literary scene. An often brilliant writer whose...body of fiction has yet to be properly assessed.”
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“ This superb futuristic mesh turns parody into an end of its own...Levin blurs the border between entertainment and reality...and creates cinema. ”