At my first sight of a painting by Samuel Bak, I had the keen sense that he was telling me stories with his brush. Now that at long last he has written this book, I find it no wonder that he has painted with his pen. In both his paintings and in this book, Bak goes beyond erecting a "memorial to the Shoah and the slaughtered Jewish people"; above all he presents a personal, a unique world. This world is filled with yearning and irony, saturated with nightmare and loneliness, pierced on occasion by a cry of theological protest. It is a world of terror and cosmic bereavement, of twisted time and metaphysical fear.

I regard Samuel Bak as one of the great painters of the 20th century. There are few artists who have so successfully represented the mad cruelty of our era -- its horrors, its desolation, its sadness and vacuity. And fewer still are the artists who have created their own unique personal language. In Bak's world, horror, humor, and dreams all solidify into one radioactive mass.

Painted in Words is not merely another painting, done with a different brush. Among the tens and hundreds of books I have read about the pre-Shoah and post-Shoah period, including novels, memoirs, documentation, and philosophy, Bak's book is unique. Despite being suffused with a sense of loss, horror, degradation, and death, it is ultimately a sanguine, funny book, full of the love of life, rocking with an almost cathartic joy. At times I found myself bursting out laughing. It is the only time in my life that I have felt sensual pleasure in reading a book seemingly dedicated to the tragedy of the Jewish people; to the destruction of city, community, and family; to the devastation of childhood and the memory of a murdered world.

But only seemingly is it dedicated to death. Actually it is a marvelous ode, a colorful hymn to the forces of life, love, creation, and the joys of the senses. Bak has written a tragicomic epic about the birth and maturing of an artist who grows from out of the amusing absurdities of childhood into the nightmares of history -- the mad cruelty of persecution and Ghetto, the strange miracles of surviving, and the arctic loneliness of those who survived.

This book is not only and not principally about "How I managed to remain alive and come through all this without losing my mind." It is above all a "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," in circumstances that Joyce could never have dreamt of, a nightmare that makes Dante's "Inferno" look like an air-conditioned club.

Like Proust's madeleine, the disappearing and reappearing Pincas -- an old book of Jewish records - released in its author a bursting stream of memories. This Pincas, eons ago in a far-off extinguished galaxy, was decorated with the drawings of a sharp-eyed, spoiled only child. Like the biblical Samuel whose destiny as prophet was assigned him from the womb, this young Samuel was destined by his entire family to grow into a painter. Bak's Lithuanian-Jewish family, with all its bourgeois aspirations, craziness, warmth, secrets, pretensions, and fears, is basically the hero of our epic.

The family, and at its head the titanic mother, was resolved that the child become an artist. Hitler had other plans. Each of the two sides employed all available means. After many reversals of fortune and frightful horrors, it became clear that the means employed by the mother and family were the more refined and efficient.

The book before us was born most probably because that child returned, Pincas in hand, not once but many times to knock on the painter's window. The child and the Pincas have brought this artist after all those years to recover and revive the child, the mother who survived, and the father who was murdered. An entire community is returned here from the dead: not just the immediate family, but a whole tribe of eccentric uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers, and great-grandparents; dramatic, lyrical, and epic characters; almost legendary figures and figures that verge on the grotesque and absurd. And here is the alchemical miracle of this book - the entire community invites us, the readers, not to weep and mourn, but to look, listen, touch, smell, find joy in the senses, yearn, laugh, and identify with its members. I entered this book like one who visits a cemetery to be alone with the dead, and found myself instead swept up into a warm, lively, and captivating ball.

Painted in words? Of course! But look, here is the wonder. It is also told in colors of varying hues and shades, in visions whose lines are fine and precise - and above all, it is told with the richness and radiance of sunlight.