doubt about their authorship. Beginning with Abramowitsch style is regarded as an important requisite of a Judeo-German work. Now we shall turn to the discussion of his several books. The subject of his first, 'The Little Man,' is an autobiography of a man, who, by low flattery, vile servility, and all dishonest ways, rises to high places of emolument which he uses entirely in order to enrich himself at the expense of the people. Such men had been the bane of Jewish communities in the middle of our century. In Berdichev it was, at the time of the publication of the book, Jacob Josef Alperin, who by similar means had come to be the right hand of the Governor General, Bibikov; but far more vile than he was Hersch Meier Held, who stood in the same relation to Alperin that the latter occupied to the Governor General. That flunky of a flunky is personified as the hero of the story, Isaac Abraham Takif. In this work we still have the ideal persons of the older writers. We are introduced there to a poor, honest, and cultured family, in whom one cannot fail to recognize his master and friend, Gottlober, and his daughter. If this work made him a host of friends among those who were the victims of Alperin and Held, the next drama he wrote endangered his stay in Berdichev, for the persons attacked in it, the representatives of the kahal, would not shrink from any crime to rid themselves of a man who, like Abramowitsch, had come to be a power and a stumbling-block to their incredible rascalities. The greatest curse of the Jewish community in Russia had ever been the meat and candle tax, which all had to pay, nominally to support communal institutions, but the greater part of which went into the pockets of the representatives of the kahal to whom the tax was farmed out. No meat and no candle could be purchased without that arbitrary imposition by the members of the kahal, who in their fiendish craving for money increased the original cost of meat several fold, and who spared no means, however criminal, to silence any opposition to their doings. It is these men that Abramowitsch had the courage to hold up to the scorn of the people in his 'The Meat-Tax, or the Gang of City Benefactors.'[82] He had to flee for his life, but the drama did its work. It even attracted the attention of the Government, which tried to remedy the evil. It became the possession of the people, and many of its salient sentences have become everyday proverbs. The revolt against that Gang of City Benefactors of Berdichev was so great that Moses Josef Chodrower, whom all recognized as the prototype of the arch-rascal Spodek in the play, and who had been a prominent and wealthy merchant, was soon driven into bankruptcy by the infuriated population that refused to support him. That was the first time that a literary production written in Judeo-German had become a factor in social affairs. A Russian troupe that was then playing at Berdichev wanted to