Asch is to the Yiddish novel what Pinski is to the drama. He is that rare phenomenon, a spontaneous artist with all the virtues and defects of improvisation. Of his longer novels, “Mottke the Vagabond” and “Uncle Moses,” both in English, give an idea of his accomplishments with old-world and new-world settings. In his short fiction he is notable for a poetic realism, a mingling of the so-called romantic and the so-called realistic, that is evident in so outwardly coarse a play as “The God of Vengeance.” Raisin is, in fiction, the artist of miniatures, of cameos, of impressions. He is hardly concerned with the surprise-ending, the “punch” and other commercial desiderata of our lesser American stories. With the facility of journalistic comparisons he has been called “the Yiddish Chekhov”; who, among the Jewish writers, has not at one time or other been the “Yiddish This-or-That”? Yet there is an element of suggestive virtue in the coupling of the names, and there have been moments when Chekhov and Maupassant signed worse things than “A Game,” though often they signed far better. Shapiro, of the writers here included, is the least widely known. There is something unreal to his visions, yet for all their external unreality they grip the reader with an indubitable power. “The Kiss” is one of his best pogrom tales. If he is scarcely known to outsiders it is because he deserves a far greater recognition from his own people. Opatoshu (pen name of Joseph Opatovsky) has strengthened a reputation as short story writer with his added success as a novelist. His fondness for nature, for animals and for Khassidic types provides a rich background for his restless imagination. Of the younger writers--if a writer is still young under forty--he shows as good promise as any of attaining to a lofty place.[2] ISAAC GOLDBERG. [Note 1: See the end of the book for Yiddish works procurable in English.] [Note 2: For permission to include Pinski’s _A Tale of a Hungry Man_ from the volume of his short stories published by Brentano’s under the title _Temptations_, I am indebted to both the author and the publishers.--I. G.] THREE GIFTS ISAAC LEIB PEREZ I. THE SCALES OF JUSTICE Somewhere many and many a year ago, a Jew breathed his last. No one, of course, may live for ever. The man was dead; the attentions due the dead were paid, and a grave among the folk of his own faith lodged him. The grave closed over him, the orphaned son recited his Kaddish and the soul flew upward--to Judgment. On arriving there it found the scales of Justice already swinging in the court chamber. Here the good deeds and the evil were to be weighed. And forthwith the dead man’s Advocate enters, the Good Spirit of his former life. A pure, snow-white sack is in his hand and he stands near the right scale of the Balance.