Petty Business

As they do every year, Yosef Zinman, a well-to-do Tel Aviv grocer, and his beloved wife Zippi plan a vacation during the holiday of Sukkot to Seefeld in the mountainous Tirols region of Austria. This year, Zippi decides to invite her sister, who has fallen on hard times with a failing perfumery business. Soon, more and more relatives join in on the trip, and the expenses quickly begin to add up. To gather all the funds needed, the family goes into the business of inexpensive clothing and fashion shows for workers' unions. The summer promises handsome revenues, but as the Zinman family nears their goal, they become increasingly vexed by their competing interests.

A tragic-comic novel in its essence, Petty Business chronicles a year in one family's life, set against the backdrop of Tel Aviv's rapidly changing global economy in the early 1990s. Pinkus's biting critique of Tel Aviv's provincial character and its residents' shtetl mentality is delivered with a perfect combination of wit, humor, and tender pathos.


About the Author

Yirmi Pinkus is an Israeli writer and illustrator living in Tel Aviv. From 1996 to 2011 he was a member of the Actus independent comics group. Petty Business was short-listed for the 2013 Sapir prize and awarded the 2014 Literary Prize by The Israel Institute.

Yardenne Greenspan holds an MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators' Association Fellowship, and in 2014 she was a resident writer and translator at Ledig House's Writers Omi program. Her translation of Shemi Zarhin's Some Day was chosen for World Literature Today's 2013 list of notable translations.

Evan Fallenberg is the author of the novels Light Fell, When We Danced on Water, and The Parting Gift, and translator of Israeli novels, plays, and libretti. He has won or been shortlisted for the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award for Literature, the Edmund White Award, and the PEN Translation Prize, among others.