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.
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.
- ↑ 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.
