THE DISPOSABLE SOULS

A province is officially declared uninhabited, and its inhabitants take a fresh soul out of the packet every morning, because the disposable kind is cleaner, cheaper and altogether more hygienic than the old multi-use sort.
A man in Sodom offers cold Coca-Cola to three travellers and saves his city without noticing. Two pensioners divorce each other, lovingly and by mutual arrangement, in order to emigrate together to a country that does not exist
Somewhere among them stands the author: a man who is a Jew particularly on Fridays, who weeps in an Orthodox church at Christmas, who once telephoned a toy company at two in the morning to establish whether the hole in his teddy bear was part of the original design, and who lost his temper with a satellite engineer over the question of whether trees can be blamed for the weather.
These twenty-five pieces - parables, recollections, and three conversations between men with nothing left to lose - were written across thirty years and several countries by someone who was relieved of his homeland and discovered, to his own considerable surprise, that this was a relief. Every label he was ever handed turned out to be disposable, including the ones people are prepared to kill for. What is left when you throw them all away is the subject of this book, and it is a good deal funnier than that makes it sound.