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STORIES AND PICTURES

STORIES AND PICTURES

BY

ISAAC LOEB PEREZ


TRANSLATED FROM THE YIDDISH BY

HELENA FRANK

PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
1906

COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Preface Contents Glossary Footnotes

PREFACE

My heartfelt thanks are due to all those who, directly or indirectly,have helped in the preparation of this book of translations; among theformer, to Professor Israel Abrahams, for invaluable help and advice atvarious junctures; and to Mr. B. B., for his detailed and scholarlyexplanations of difficult passages—explanations to which, fearing tooverload a story-book with notes, I have done scant justice.

The sympathetic reader who wishes for information concerning the authorof these tales will find it in Professor Wiener's "History of YiddishLiterature in the Nineteenth Century," together with much that will helphim to a better appreciation of their drift.

To fully understand any one of them, we should need to know intimatelythe life of the Russian Jews who figure in their pages, and to befamiliar with the lore of the Talmud and the Kabbalah, which colorstheir talk as the superstitions of Slav or Celtic lands color the talkof their respective peasants.

A Yiddish writer once told me, he feared these tales would be tootief-jüdisch (intensely Jewish) for Gentile readers; and even in thecase of the Jewish English-reading public, the "East (of Europe) isEast, and West is West."

Perez, however, is a distinctly modern writer, and his views andsympathies are of the widest.

He was born in 1855, and these stories were all written, quite broadlyspeaking, between 1875 and 1900. They were all published in Russia,under the censorship—a fact to be borne in mind when reading such pagesas "Travel-Pictures" (which, by the way, is not a story at all), "In thePost-Chaise," and others.

We may hope that conditions of life such as are depicted in "The DeadTown" will soon belong entirely to history. It is for those who haveseen to tell us whether or not the picture is correct.

The future of Yiddish in a Free Russia is hard to tell. There are somewho consider its early disappearance by no means a certainty. Howeverthat may be, it is at present the only language by which the masses ofthe Russian Jews can be reached, and Perez's words of 1894, in which heurges the educated writers to remember this fact, have lost none oftheir interest: