In one of Abramowitsch's novels a woman, purchasing a prayer from an itinerant bookseller, gives the following reason for being so addicted to them: "For us poor women, the Tchines are the only remedy for hearts full of sores and wounds; they furnish us with the only means of weeping to our hearts' content, and of finding relief for our saddened spirits in a warm stream of tears.... It is truly aggravating and painful to see men who do not understand and who do not wish to understand our hearts make light of women's Tchines and begrudge us the only consolation we have. Let them take a seat in the women's synagogue on a Saturday or some holiday, and let them watch the many poor, unfortunate women who have come away from their homes under difficulties:--one suffering an evil fate from her husband, another a forlorn widow; one heavy with child, another downhearted and exhausted from watching long nights at the bed of her sick, suckling babe; one with swollen, blistered hands from standing at the stove, and another with her face careworn, and pale from heavy slave's work, from walking eternally under a yoke;--let them watch all these sad, downtrodden women standing around the Reader, let them hear them wail and lament with eyes uplifted to their merciful, all-kind Father in heaven, bathing in tears and ready to tear their hearts out of their bosoms. If the men could see such a scene with their own eyes, they would, I am sure, never open their mouths again to ridicule the prayers of women." Outside of these prayers and ethical treatises the most popular books since the middle of our century have been two elementary works,--one on arithmetic, teaching the rudiments of the art, the other a letterwriter. It is probably no exaggeration to say that a hundred editions of the latter book have appeared in print. It was composed by Lewin Abraham Liondor, and was intended as a guide for Judeo-German spelling and letter-writing by children and women. This has been almost the only text-book written in and for the vernacular. Liondor knew how to make it entertaining by having a series of connected stories in the form of letters and an occasional song interspersed in them. The book begins with an interesting dialogue in the form of letters between the letterwriter and the author, and ends with a number of letters from and to a schadchen, the go-between in marriage affairs. From the dialogue one can see what great popularity this humble work has had in its time. There have been issued in the last ten years a number of similar letterwriters, more in accord with the demands of the time, but the naïveté of Liondor's book has all disappeared in them, and they present no interest to the reader.