Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project) YIDDISH TALES TRANSLATED BY HELENA FRANK [Illustration: colophon] PHILADELPHIA THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA 1912 COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA PREFACE This little volume is intended to be both companion and complement to "Stories and Pictures," by I. L. Perez, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America, in 1906. Its object was twofold: to introduce the non-Yiddish reading public to some of the many other Yiddish writers active in Russian Jewry, and--to leave it with a more cheerful impression of Yiddish literature than it receives from Perez alone. Yes, and we have collected, largely from magazines and papers and unbound booklets, forty-eight tales by twenty different authors. This, thanks to such kind helpers as Mr. F. Hieger, of London, without whose aid we should never have been able to collect the originals of these stories, Mr. Morris Meyer, of London, who most kindly gave me the magazines, etc., in which some of them were contained, and Mr. Israel J. Zevin, of New York, that able editor and delightful _feuilletonist_, to whose critical knowledge of Yiddish letters we owe so much. Some of these writers, Perez, for example, and Sholom-Alechem, are familiar by name to many of us already, while the reputation of others rests, in circles enthusiastic but tragically small, on what they have written in Hebrew.[1] Such are Berdyczewski, Jehalel, Frischmann, Berschadski, and the silver-penned Judah Steinberg. On these last two be peace in the Olom ho-Emess. The Olom ha-Sheker had nothing for them but struggle and suffering and an early grave. [1] Berschadski's "Forlorn and Forsaken," Frischmann's "Three Who Ate," and Steinberg's "A Livelihood" and "At the Matzes," though here translated from the Yiddish versions, were probably written in Hebrew originally. In the case of the former two, it would seem that the Yiddish version was made by the authors themselves, and the same may be true of Steinberg's tales, too. The tales given here are by no means all equal in literary merit, but they have each its special note, its special echo from that strangely fascinating world so often quoted, so little understood (we say it against ourselves), the Russian Ghetto--a world in the passing, but whose more precious elements, shining, for all who care to see them, through every page of these unpretending tales, and mixed with less and less of what has made their misfortune, will surely live on, free, on the one hand, to blend with all and everything akin to them, and free, on the other, to develop along their own lines--and this year here, next year in Jerusalem.