Yiddish Tales

TRANSLATED BY HELENA FRANK

PHILADELPHIA The Jewish Publication Society of America 1912
Copyright, 1912, By the Jewish Publication Society of America

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.
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.