Chapter I: 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.

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