Tinocchia: The Adventures of a Jewish Puppetta

While in the archives room of the Siena Municipal Public Library, I noticed a cardboard box labeled "Lorenzini?" Since Lorenzini wrote Pinocchio under the pen-name Collodi, I opened the box and was astounded to see a handwritten manuscript titled: Tinocchia, the Adventures of a Jewish Puppetta. I photographed the pages, and soon enough translated the story into English. Tinocchia, the story's narrator, is created by her carpenter father, Yossi, who named her after the Hebrew word for "baby," tinok, and as a nod to his fellow woodworker, Gepetto, the creator of Pinocchio. While riding on her magic cart, Tinocchia bumps into a puppetto who introduces himself as Nipocchio. Naturally, the puppetto's nose grows . . . Pinocchio and Tinocchia share adventures: Tinocchia becomes involved with Samael, the Dark Angel; Pinocchio and Tinocchia encounter pirates on a sailboat which gets overturned in a storm. One day Pinocchio visits asa real boy and offers Tinocchia a magic salve. She scolds him that he has no right to take the salve. In any case, she does not want mortality; she wants to live. Pinocchio turns back into a puppetto to be with her. And, like in a true fairy tale, they live happily ever . . . after . . . presumably.

About the Author :
Curt Leviant has authored nine critically acclaimed works of fiction.He has won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and writing fellowshipsfrom the National Endowment for the Arts, the RockefellerFoundation, the Jerusalem Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundationin Venice, and the New Jersey Arts Council. His work has beenincluded in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: the O. HenryAwards, and other anthologies - and praised by two Nobel laureates: Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel. With the publication of Leviant'snovels into French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian and otherlanguages - some of which have become international best sellers- reviewers have hailed his books as masterpieces and comparedhis imaginative fiction to that of Nabokov, Borges, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Vargas Llosa, Harold Pinter, and Tolstoy. The French version ofDiary of an Adulterous Woman was singled out as one of the TwentyBest Books of the Year in France and among the seven best novels.Kafka's Son in the French translation was hailed on French televisionas a "work of genius" and by French critics as "a masterpiece."But the most memorable praise has come from ChaunceyMabe, Book Editor of South Florida's Sun-Sentinel, who wrote: "CurtLeviant is one of the greatest novelists you've never heard of. Hisserio-comic novels, including Diary of an Adulterous Woman (thebest novel I've read during the past ten years), should place him incompany with Joseph Heller or even Saul Bellow..."