Yaakov Shabtai

"In Uncle Peretz Takes Off, the first collection of Yaakov Shabtai's short fiction in English, a gallery of comic and idiosyncratic characters gives Tel Aviv of the 1940s an unpredictable frontier quality. Shabtai portrays a society of individualists and schemers in search of redemption: Uncle Shmuel tries to make his fortune as a poulterer; Albert Weiss-Fink, a born swindler, dreams of a traveling circus in Palestine, while promising to marry three different women; the uncontrollably ribald Tamara Bell, who poses naked for artists, causes adolescent boys in the neighborhood small, excruciating flickers of desire."--BOOK JACKET.