Nine Gates By Jiri Langer A wonderful collection of Chassidic tales from Central Europe, providing a fascinating introduction to this mystical Jewish tradition. ISBN-13: 9780227675526 Specifications: 216x138mm, 304pp, Hardback Price: £17.50 • US$37.50 Publication: November 1987 Order this Title Now

About this Book

Before the First World War, Jiri Langer, a youth in Prague of Jewish parentage, suddenly packed his few belongings and to the consternation of his family, made a journey into a remote part of eastern Galicia, where he settled among the Chassidim, a strange, self-contained community of Jewish mystics.

This fascinating book grew out of his life and experience among these isolated people. He found 'a little nation' living in great poverty, who had deliberately cut themselves off from the mainstream of modern European civilisation, and lived their lives in a seemingly endless state of religious joy and exaltation; a people who had turned from Western materialism and had embraced a deeply spiritual and more brotherly way of life, which found joyful expression in song, dance, and a wonderful oral folk-literature.

Nine Gates is the legacy of Jiri Langer's life among the Chassidim. He tells of their enthusiasm, their childlike faith, their ecstasies, their austerities, their feasts, their wonder-working Holy Rabbis, and their esoteric wisdom. The stories told of the saints of the Chassidim is one of their most precious possessions, and to relate them is an act of piety. A part of this book comprises a collection of these shrewd and earthy tales of the Holy men who ruled these little spiritual kingdoms generation after generation.

This book is not only a journey into the past, but also a picture of the way of life in a very remote part of Europe that has vanished forever. It will be of intense interest to students of mysticism and of comparative religion as well as a fascinating piece of autobiography.

About the Author

Jiri Langer was born in Prague, and was a friend of the theologian Alfred Fuchs and the writer Franz Kafka. Attracted to the mysticism of the Chassidim, he became a devotee and assiduous chronicler of their way of life. His writings were banned and destroyed when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. He was able to escape to Palestine in 1939, but died in 1943 of illnesses brought on by the hardships of the journey.