Arbinka, Shtucks and Co.- The Makings of Kishon’s Social Satire

He has a hard time, Kishon's protagonist—for the most part Kishon himself, or more accurately, his literary double—a non-mechanical reproduction of the biographical narrator into the kingdom of the fictional. The tap leaks, water seeps out of the cellar, the child's pacifier has got lost, the washing machine is dancing on its legs, the air conditioner makes an unholy row, so does the alarm, a fly alights again and again upon the narrator's left ear, ants invade the kitchen, Gad Winternitz's mother telephones in the middle of Colombo on television, his spectacles have disappeared, the phone goes again precisely when he is soaping his back in the shower, the waiter's eye is not catchable, the soup is too hot (unlike the tea, which is too cold), the plastic milk bags drip. It would seem that if those are your troubles, if these are the burdens that embitter your life, then, no doubt, you are living in a Leibnitzian world, which is—as is well known—the best of all possible worlds.