The Project Gutenberg EBook of Yiddish Tales, by Various

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Title: Yiddish Tales

Author: Various

Translator: Helena Frank

Release Date: September 12, 2010 [EBook #33707]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YIDDISH TALES ***

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YIDDISH TALES

TRANSLATED BY
HELENA FRANK

[Illustration: colophon]

PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
1912

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 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,"