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STORIES AND PICTURES

BY

ISAAC LOEB PEREZ

TRANSLATED FROM THE YIDDISH BY

HELENA FRANK

[Illustration: colophon]

PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
1906

COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA




PREFACE


My heartfelt thanks are due to all those who, directly or indirectly,
have helped in the preparation of this book of translations; among the
former, to Professor Israel Abrahams, for invaluable help and advice at
various junctures; and to Mr. B. B., for his detailed and scholarly
explanations of difficult passages--explanations to which, fearing to
overload a story-book with notes, I have done scant justice.

The sympathetic reader who wishes for information concerning the author
of these tales will find it in Professor Wiener's "History of Yiddish
Literature in the Nineteenth Century," together with much that will help
him to a better appreciation of their drift.

To fully understand any one of them, we should need to know intimately
the life of the Russian Jews who figure in their pages, and to be
familiar with the lore of the Talmud and the Kabbalah, which colors
their talk as the superstitions of Slav or Celtic lands color the talk
of their respective peasants.

A Yiddish writer once told me, he feared these tales would be too
_tief-juedisch_ (intensely Jewish) for Gentile readers; and even in the
case of the Jewish English-reading public, the "East (of Europe) is
East, and West is West."

Perez, however, is a distinctly modern writer, and his views and
sympathies are of the widest.

He was born in 1855, and these stories were all written, quite broadly
speaking, between 1875 and 1900. They were all published in Russia,
under the censorship--a fact to be borne in mind when reading such pages
as "Travel-Pictures" (which, by the way, is not a story at all), "In the
Post-Chaise," and others.

We may hope that conditions of life such as are depicted in "The Dead
Town" will soon belong entirely to history. It is for those who have
seen to tell us whether or not the picture is correct.

The future of Yiddish in a Free Russia is hard to tell. There are some
who consider its early disappearance by no means a certainty. However
that may be, it is at present the only language by which the masses of
the Russian Jews can be reached, and Perez's words of 1894, in which he
urges the educated writers to remember this fact, have lost none of
their interest:

     "Nowadays everyone must work for his own, must plough and sow his
     own particular plot of land, although, or rather _because_ we
     believe that the future will represent one universal store, whither
     shall be carried all the corn of all the harvests....

     "We do not wish to desert the flag of universal humanity.

     "We do not wish to sow the weeds of Chauvinism, the thorns of
     fanaticism, the tares of scholastic philosophy.

     "We want to pull up the weeds by the roots, to cut down the briars,
     to burn the tares, and to sow the pure grain of human ideas, human
     feelings, and knowledge.

     "We will break up our bit of land, and plough and sow, because we
     firmly believe that some day there will be a great common store,
     out of which all the hungry will be fed alike.

     "We believe that storm and wind and rain will have an end, that a
     day is coming when earth shall yield her increase, and heaven give
     warmth and light!

     "And we do not wish _our_ people, in the day of harvest, to stand
     apart, weeping for misspent years, while the rest make holiday,
     forced to beg, with shame, for bread that was earned by the sweat
     and toil of others.

     "We want to bring a few sheaves to the store as well as they; we
     want to be husbandmen also."

Whenever, in the course of translation, I have come across a Yiddish
proverb or idiomatic expression of which I knew an English equivalent, I
have used the latter without hesitation. To avoid tiresome
circ