LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 489 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius Yiddish Short Stories Edited by Isaac Goldberg HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS Copyright, 1923, Haldeman-Julius Company YIDDISH SHORT STORIES CONTENTS Introduction Three Gifts The Judgement A Tale of a Hungry Man A Strange Climate A Game The Kiss INTRODUCTION Of the authors represented in this little collection, Isaac Leib Perez stands foremost in time and in renown. By more than one competent critic he has been found worthy to occupy a distinguished place among the writers of the nineteenth century in any tongue. Mediocre as a dramatist, he rises as a poet and particularly as an artist in prose to moments of unaffected genius. Rarely is his allegory without that humanizing quality which keeps it from degenerating into merely pictorial evasions of thought. If allegory, even in the hands of a Dante, cannot always be kept free from the adulteration of a wilful symbolism, there are times when it represents so successfully the inner intention of the creator that it becomes in a very true sense a creation. That arch-enemy of allegorical writing, Benedetto Croce, has shown how in many a passage of the great Florentine’s _Commedia_ it is possible, indeed, esthetically necessary,--to throw all thought of Dante’s concealed meanings to the winds and let the picture and the words speak for the human Dante behind them. Before Croce, Federico De Sanctis--who anticipated more than a little of Croce’s methods in literary criticism, and to whom Croce is so greatly indebted--demonstrated the same sanative truth. In such simple tales of Perez as “Bontsche the Silent,” or the “Three Gifts” here included, the allegorical method is purged of all cryptic allusions. It becomes essentially human, essentially of the earth, for all its preoccupations with heaven. Pinski, perhaps the foremost dramatist of his race, first won his reputation for his stories of the rising Yiddish proletariat. He is, indeed, the discoverer of the proletariat in Yiddish fiction, and was himself “discovered” by Perez. Pinski is pre-eminently a psychologist. Whether one reads his numerous plays[1] or the book of tales that appeared in English a number of years ago, one divines first of all the prober of human souls and the passions engendered within them. His “Beruriah” is, to me, one of the masterpieces of the short story in modern days, none the less contemporaneous for its origin in a Talmudic setting. “The Tale of a Hungry Man,” by which he is here represented, combines in admirable fashion his early proletarian interests with his psychological methods.