A Cure for Serpents A Cure for Serpents A Cure for Serpents: A Doctor in Africa is a 1955 travel book by Alberto Denti di Pirajno, later the Duke of Pirajno, an Italian doctor, writer and former colonial governor of Tripoli. Set in Libya, Ethiopia and Somaliland, the book is a collection of anecdotes about various places he visited in his work as a physician in North Africa in the 1920s and the people he met, which includes tribal chieftains, Berber princes, courtesans and Tuareg tribesmen and of a lioness, which became part pet and part guard. The book was translated into English in
A Contract with God as they find their way out of the tenement's, and the city's, confinement. According to academic Derek Royal, Jewish ethnicity is prominent throughout the stories; in "A Contract with God" and "Cookalein", religious and cultural Jewish symbolry are prominent, though in the middle two stories, there is little outward evidence of the characters' Jewishness. The two outer stories further emphasize Jewish identity with the extra-urban portions of their settings—the rural Russian origin of the religious Hersh in "Contract", and the Catskill mountains in "Cookalein", a retreat commonly associated with Jews in the 20th century. Eisner deals with representing Jewish identity