Mendel Marantz

New York/London: Harper & Brothers. Very Good+ in Good dj. 1926. Later Printing. Hardcover. NOISBN . [slight bumping and minor wear to lower extremities, remnant of old price sticker at upper corner of rear pastedown; the jacket has some paper loss at both ends of the spine and at the lower right corner of the front panel, otherwise just modestly edgeworn with handful of little nicks and tears] (NOTE that the jacket's front hinge, which had completely split, has been repaired by a professional paper conservator.) (color frontispiece + 10 sepiatone plates) Comic novel set in New York's Lower East Side, centered around a family whose father, the title character, is "the essence of laziness" -- "a good father, a kind husband, but he will absolutely not go to work. His firm resolve [is] to lead a life without drudgery" by using (in his estimation) the brains God gave him. ("Some people work with their feet, others with their hands. I work with my head.") To the continuing annoyance of his loving but argumentative and long-suffering wife Zelde, he is a philosophical dreamer, a would-be inventor who's got a hundred brilliant inventions (none of which ever come to fruition) but "pays the landlord with jokes." (A sample Mendel joke, of which this book contains at least one per page, often more: "What is a marriage without mistakes? A mouth without teeth. It don't give you pain, but it don't give you pleasure, neither.") Zelde, for her part, frets like only a stereotypical Jewish wife and mother can fret -- about the constant looming spectre of poverty, about the unmarried condition of their daughter Sarah, and so on. NOTE that I believe this to be the first printing, although it deviates from typical Harpers practice (there is no letter-code); I called this a "novel," above, but the copyright page information and other research shows that a number of the episodes in the book -- maybe all of them -- had been previously published in the magazine Pictorial Review between 1922 and 1924. ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .