Tale
The Magician
דער קונצנמאכער
Isaac Leib Peretz · 1917
Synopsis
In a Jewish small town, a conjuror arrives shortly before Passover and puts on a show: he pulls objects out of thin air, and roubles appear in the mud on his shoes. In the same town, a pious and wretched couple, Haim-Yona and his wife, have nothing for the festival meal; the husband refuses to ask the neighbours for help, and his wife is ashamed of the table she will not be able to set. The stranger comes to ask to be their guest for the seder, tells them not to worry, and a feast covers the table. Troubled, the husband goes to consult the rabbi.
Context
The tale belongs to the vein in which Peretz takes up folk and Hasidic stories; it draws on the legends of the prophet Elijah. It had appeared in Yiddish a few years before 1917, the year in which the publisher Kletskin, in Vilna, issued it as a thirteen-page booklet illustrated by Marc Chagall; the painter later said he had found in it poor and splendid Jewish images. Joachim Neugroschel translated it into English under the title The Conjuror in 1978, and Hillel Halkin under the title The Magician in The I. L. Peretz Reader, in 2002. It has given rise to several children's picture books in English.
Who it is for
A short story of a few pages, with no published French translation. It helps to know that the seder is the ritual meal of the first evening of Passover.
Prizes and reception
Illustrated by Chagall in 1917, the tale is among its author's best known in English, where it has often been translated and adapted.
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