Of the five books printed, one is a novel, the other four are dramas. The first, under the name of 'The Fillet of Pearls,' shows up the hypocrisy and rascality of the Khassidic miracle-workers, as only one who has himself been initiated in their doings could relate them. The hero of the novel is Mechel Mazeewe. He is discovered eating on a minor fast day, and the Rabbi uses this as an excuse for extorting all the money the poor fellow had earned by teaching little children and young women. His engagement to one of his pupils, the daughter of the beadle, is broken off for the same reason. Disgusted with his town, he goes away from it in order to earn a living elsewhere. Good fortune takes him to Breslau, where he, for the first time, discovers that there are also clean, honest, peaceful Jews. He is regenerated, and returns to his native town, where in the meantime the miracle-working Rabbi has succeeded in rooting out the last vestige of heresy. At the house of the Rabbi, Mechel has an occasion to prove the falseness of his pretensions to the assembled people. Mechel is reunited with his bride. This bare skeleton of the plot is developed with great care, and is adorned with a variety of incidents, each forming a story within the story. The biting satire, the sharp humor, the rapid development of situations, are only excelled by his dramatic sense, which makes him pass rapidly from descriptions, without elaborating them to the form of dialogue. His mastery of the dialect is remarkable; for although one can here and there detect his intimate acquaintance with German literature, there is not a single case where he has been led under obligations to the German language in thought or a word: German is as foreign to him as French or Latin. Of his dramas it will be sufficient to discuss one to show their general structure. The most dramatic of these is the one entitled 'The First Recruit' and tells of the terrible time in 1827 when the Ukase drafting Jewish young men into the army had for the first time been promulgated. To the ignorant masses it seemed as though the world would come to an end. To avoid the great misfortune of having their sons taken away from them, they married them off before they had reached their teens; finding that that did not prevent the 'catchers' from seizing them, maimed, halt, sickly men were preferred as husbands to their daughters; in short, all was done to avert the unspeakable calamity of serving the Czar. As in the novel, there are plots within the plot, and didactic passages are woven into the play without in the least disturbing its unity.