This little volume is intended to be both companion and complement to
"Stories and Pictures," by I. L. Perez, published by the Jewish
Publication Society of America, in 1906.
Its object was twofold: to introduce the non-Yiddish reading public to
some of the many other Yiddish writers active in Russian Jewry, and--to
leave it with a more cheerful impression of Yiddish literature than it
receives from Perez alone. Yes, and we have collected, largely from
magazines and papers and unbound booklets, forty-eight tales by twenty
different authors. This, thanks to such kind helpers as Mr. F. Hieger,
of London, without whose aid we should never have been able to collect
the originals of these stories, Mr. Morris Meyer, of London, who most
kindly gave me the magazines, etc., in which some of them were
contained, and Mr. Israel J. Zevin, of New York, that able editor and
delightful _feuilletonist_, to whose critical knowledge of Yiddish
letters we owe so much.
Some of these writers, Perez, for example, and Sholom-Alechem, are
familiar by name to many of us already, while the reputation of others
rests, in circles enthusiastic but tragically small, on what they have
written in Hebrew.[1] Such are Berdyczewski, Jehalel, Frischmann,
Berschadski, and the silver-penned Judah Steinberg. On these last two be
peace in the Olom ho-Emess. The Olom ha-Sheker had nothing for them but
struggle and suffering and an early grave.
[1] Berschadski's "Forlorn and Forsaken," Frischmann's "Three
Who Ate," and Steinberg's "A Livelihood" and "At the Matzes," though
here translated from the Yiddish versions, were probably written in
Hebrew originally. In the case of the former two, it would seem that the
Yiddish version was made by the authors themselves, and the same may be
true of Steinberg's tales, too.
The tales given here are by no means all equal in literary merit, but
they have each its special note, its special echo from that strangely
fascinating world so often quoted, so little understood (we say it
against ourselves), the Russian Ghetto--a world in the passing, but
whose more precious elements, shining, for all who care to see them,
through every page of these unpretending tales, and mixed with less and
less of what has made their misfortune, will surely live on, free, on
the one hand, to blend with all and everything akin to them, and free,
on the other, to develop along their own lines--and this year here, next
year in Jerusalem.
The American sketches by Zevin and S. Libin differ from the others only
in their scene of action. Lerner's were drawn from the life in a little
town in Bessarabia, the others are mostly Polish. And the folk tale,
which is taken from Joshua Meisach's collection, published in Wilna in
1905, with the title Ma'asiyos vun der Baben, oder Nissim ve-Niflo'os,
might have sprung from almost any Ghetto of the Old World.
We sincerely regret that nothing from the pen of the beloved
"Grandfather" of Yiddish story-tellers in print, Abramowitsch (Mendele
Mocher Seforim), was found quite suitable for insertion here, his
writings being chiefly much longer than the type selected for this book.
Neither have we come across anything appropriate to our purpose by
another old favorite, J. Dienesohn. We were, however, able to insert
three tales by the veteran author Mordecai Spektor, whose simple style
and familiar figures go straight to the people's heart.
With regard to the second half of our object, greater cheerfulness, this
collection is an utter failure. It has variety, on account of the many
different authors, and the originals have wit and humor in plenty, for
wit and humor and an almost passionate playfulness are in the very soul
of the language, but it is not cheerful, and we wonder now how we ever
thought it could be so, if the collective picture given of Jewish life
were, despite its fictitious material, to be anything like a true one.
The drollest of the tales, "Gymnasiye" (we refer to the originals), is
perhaps the saddest, anyhow in point of actuality, seeing that the
Russian Government is planning to make education impossible of
attainment by more and more of the Jewish youth--children given into its
keeping as surely as any others, and for the crushing of whose lives it
will have to answer.
Well, we have done our best. Among these tales are favorites of ours
which we have not so much as mentioned by name, thus leaving the gentle
reader at liberty to make his own.