The Prophet of Tenth Street: A Novel

Tsipi Keller

Mas 2012 · State University of New York Press

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In this literary love story, Marcus Weiss, a loyal denizen of New York City, retires at age fifty to work on a dictionary he has grandly titled "The Human Gesture in Western Literature." Comparing himself to Flaubert, who read fifteen hundred books in order to compose his Bouvard and Pécuchet—Marcus immerses himself in literature, culling quotations and passages for his dictionary and treating his friends to impromptu readings of the "pearls" he finds, all the while lecturing them about the emptiness and futility of consumerism. His lover, Gina, and his best friend, Oscar, do their best to indulge him, but when they've had enough, they poke fun at this modern-day "prophet." One day, while Marcus is at work in his warm and secluded study, an old man invades his imagination, and Marcus, enchanted, allows the old man entry and begins to write his biography. Soon, time distinctions blur: does Marcus, as he looks far into the future, imagine himself as an old man, living alone with his books, or is the old man the actual Marcus, now eighty years old, looking back and recounting a time in his life when his dear ones—Gina, Oscar, and all his other contemporaries—were still living?

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Tsipi Keller was born in Prague, raised in Israel, and has been living in the United States since 1974. Her short fiction and her poetry translations have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her novels include Jackpot and Retelling. Keller has also translated several poetry collections, including Dan Pagis's Last Poems, Irit Katzir's And I Wrote Poems, and her own edited collection, Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry, also published by SUNY Press. She lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.