The Silent Gondoliers: A Fable by S. Morgenstern

Once, everyone knew that the gondoliers of Venice had the finest voices in all the world. But now, alas, few remember those days and fewer still living had been blessed to hear them. No one was able to discover the secret of the sudden silence of the golden-voiced gondoliers–no one, it seems, but S. Morgenstern. Now for the first time Morgenstern recounts the sad and noble story of the ambitions, frustrations and eventual triumph of Luigi, the gondolier with the goony smile.