From the Old Marketplace: A Memoir of Laughter, Survival and Coming of Age in Eastern Europe

[Buloff's] gift...of evoking multiple levels of reality--comic and tragic, absurd and mundane, sophisticated and innocent, subjective and objective, high and low, actual and fantastic--endows his memoir with the universal qualities of great literature and transforms it into a work of art...Buloff has succeeded in capturing the authentic inner voice that speaks within each of us, the voice that is ageless. --Tova Reich, Washington Post Book World

For all its forays into the fantastic realm of childhood fancies and the fearful arenas of pogroms, upheaval, and war, [this book] remains a tightly written narrative...as compelling and dramatic as a traveler's tale told on a winter's night. --Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor

Breadlines and cigarette shortages; anti-Semitism and ethnic animosity; shifting alliances and power struggles; pogrom, war, occupation, pestilence, revolution--all the disasters that in the first two decades of this century befell Vilnius, the old capital of Lithuania, tumble through the pages of Buloff's novel. In the Central/East European absurdist tradition (Mrozek, Gombrowicz, Olesha, Pil'niak, Grass) that jumbles unbearable reality into a phantasmagoric kaleidoscope, narrator Yosik relates the chaotic history of his spiritual home, Vilnius's old marketplace, and his own quirky Bildungsroman as an undersized Jewish boy with a glib tongue and vivid imagination.Wrenchingly funny and historically faithful, the book...has all the gallant vitality of the vanished life of the marketplace. -- Library Journal