YIDDISH TALES
TRANSLATED BY
HELENA FRANK
PHILADELPHIA
The Jewish Publication Society of America1912
Copyright, 1912,
By the Jewish Publication Society of America
PREFACE
This little volume is intended to be both companion and complement to"Stories and Pictures," by I. L. Perez, published by the JewishPublication Society of America, in 1906.
Its object was twofold: to introduce the non-Yiddish reading public tosome of the many other Yiddish writers active in Russian Jewry, and—toleave it with a more cheerful impression of Yiddish literature than itreceives from Perez alone. Yes, and we have collected, largely frommagazines and papers and unbound booklets, forty-eight tales by twentydifferent authors. This, thanks to such kind helpers as Mr. F. Hieger,of London, without whose aid we should never have been able to collectthe originals of these stories, Mr. Morris Meyer, of London, who mostkindly gave me the magazines, etc., in which some of them werecontained, and Mr. Israel J. Zevin, of New York, that able editor anddelightful feuilletonist, to whose critical knowledge of Yiddishletters we owe so much.
Some of these writers, Perez, for example, and Sholom-Alechem, arefamiliar by name to many of us already, while the reputation of othersrests, in circles enthusiastic but tragically small, on what they havewritten in Hebrew.[1] Such are Berdyczewski, Jehalel, Frischmann,Berschadski, and the silver-penned Judah Steinberg. On these last two bepeace in the Olom ho-Emess. The Olom ha-Sheker had nothing for them butstruggle and suffering and an early grave.
[1] Berschadski's "Forlorn and Forsaken," Frischmann's "ThreeWho Ate," and Steinberg's "A Livelihood" and "At the Matzes," thoughhere translated from the Yiddish versions, were probably written inHebrew originally. In the case of the former two, it would seem that theYiddish version was made by the authors themselves, and the same may betrue of Steinberg's tales, too.
The tales given here are by no means all equal in literary merit, butthey have each its special note, its special echo from that strangelyfascinating world so often quoted, so little understood (we say itagainst ourselves), the Russian Ghetto—a world in the passing, butwhose more precious elements, shining, for all who care to see them,through every page of these unpretending tales, and mixed with less andless of what has made their misfortune, will surely live on, free, onthe 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, nextyear in Jerusalem.
The American sketches by Zevin and S. Libin differ from the others onlyin their scene of action. Lerner's were drawn from the life in a littletown in Bessarabia, the others are mostly Polish. And the folk tale,which is taken from Joshua Meisach's collection, published in Wilna in1905, 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