If the pottery on the front cover looks familiar to gallery-goers, it should. Full disclosure that Izzy Abrahmson is the alias of Mark Binder, known for audiobooks like the Audie-nominated Loki Ragnarok. Binder’s wife Heather is currently displaying at the gallery, selling her ceramics at Angell Street Galleries from now until May 31st. Her cups are fired from patterned tendrils made of different clays, with starkly contrasting geometries that coalesce into vessels you can keep on your living room shelf. Or better yet, you can drink from them.

In Abrahmson’s limited-edition prose chapbook The Cracked Potter, the eccentric Nava Ortlieb is similarly trying to toe the line between the artistic and the functional. Arriving mud-covered in the village of Chelm, she endears herself momentarily to a restaurant owner by promising she’ll replace her lidded bowls with better plates for keeping the soup warm.

Later that night she sets her hut ablaze. The townspeople, including the merchant’s wife Shoshana Cantor, rush in to throw buckets on the “crazy lady’s” fire. The walls of Nava’s hut crumble to reveal a beehive-shaped kiln, deliberately plotted on wet soil so the fire couldn’t spread. She knows what she’s doing better than anyone else does, narrative voice included.

The Cracked Potter largely abides by the humorous Yiddish-language folktales of the Wise Men of Chelm. They follow a pretty similar formula: town elders bumble over the worst possible solutions to their problems until a lowly peasant knocks some sense into them. In Isaac Bashevis Singer's “The Snows of Chelm,” the elders wish to preserve the “divine intervention” of a snowfall, and to keep it from being sullied by footprints they devise a plan to carry their errand boy across the village on a four-legged table. (Spoiler: the townspeople get their own footprints in the snow instead, which is twice as humiliating.)

As Izzy Abrahmson, Binder charges the tall tales of Chelm with a bevy of squabbling voices. Some are not-so-serious, some even less so, and all begging for a role in an audiobook. Like the stories of Sholem Aleichem, The Cracked Potter works best as part of its series, where characters only listed off as observers here – a fisherman, a rabbi, the town’s older women – get more proper introductions.

Potter as a standalone story celebrates the craft of ceramics with an appreciation that stands out starkly against the village backdrop. A chipped, thumb-printed cup, molded by the Biblical Leah for her unfaithful husband Jacob and passed down to Nava by her mentor, “had a beautiful crosshatch pattern around the top half” and “a pattern of lines that looked like waves on the surface of a pond or river” at its bottom. “The more [Shoshana] looked, as she rotated the cup,” Abrahmson writes, “the more Shoshana saw how the straight pattern wove into the curves, which turned back into the straight.”

The largely ekphrastic end of The Cracked Potter won’t produce the same laughs as the start, but its mysticism and insights into Nava’s creative arc boldly welcome her in future Village Life stories, should she decide to appear. Whether you’ve found yourself deprived of good Chelm stories in the past several decades, or you want a key to understanding the process behind the pottery on the gallery shelves, The Cracked Potter is worth a shot for the thirty or so minutes it’ll take you to read.

You can order signed and numbered copies via Light Publications or from ShopLocal RI.