My dear Mrs. Trager,
It gives me great pleasure to write a preface to your new book. I
consider it a real privilege, since it represents the fulfilment of a
hope expressed some five years ago. When you sent me the first article
for "The Sinaist" I told you that your pen would win the love and the
esteem not only of the child, but essentially also of the adult readers.
The simple joyousness of your style, the beauty and freshness of the
atmosphere, which you very well succeed in bringing to the pages of your
books, the strength of your faith, and the vividness of your
description, the love of Jew above the love of Palestine, all these
combine to render your volumes valuable additions to the small stock of
good Jewish literature in English. It is not only that you teach, while
talking so pleasantly; that you instruct while you interest and amuse;
that you have your own personality in the stories; that you convey the
charm of Eretz Israel, and the beauty of holiday spirit; but because
your stories help us to feel the depth of faith and the height of ideal
as the self-evident, normal factors of Jewish life.
For the children of our age, both young and old, should know that that
God-consciousness of the Jew, that wondrous sense of eternity in his
mission, is not a laboriously acquired conviction, not the result of
some spasmodic effort of grasping the innermost meaning of our history,
but the natural pervading spirit of Jewish life, the air which the Jew
breathes, when he lives with Torah as his guide and Mitzvah as his
ladder towards heaven.
They who read your stories conceive a deep love of Judaism, they find a
desire growing in them to live the life which produces such happiness
and goodness, they will want to study the Law and lore, of which that
life is an outward expression. I have given your tales to children in
various countries and all of them were enchanted with them, regretting
that "there were only two books by Mrs. Trager." I am glad indeed to
find that another one is coming out. And it is in the interest of our
youth that I hope you will give us every year some of these nourishing
and very palatable fruits of your pen.
You will thereby be doing an additional bit for our God and our people
whom you are serving so loyally. You reinterpret to the Jewish youth of
to-day the treasures they are so carelessly abandoning, you will shed
light and reawaken love and hope in the heart of many a Jew, who seemed
to feel that our glorious faith had no message for the child of to-day,
unless it were shorn by our 'religious' barbers, robbed of its native
beauty and reduced to some platform-commonplace. As a lamented London
Maggid told me, "There still live some real soldiers of God." Such are
those who use persuasion from the pulpit, such as shine through the
example of their own humane Jewishness and such as capture our hearts by
artless beautiful tales of Jewish life and lore.