Stories and Pictures

STORIES AND PICTURES



BY ISAAC LOEB PEREZ TRANSLATED FROM THE YIDDISH BY HELENA FRANK
PHILADELPHIA THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA 1906
COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA

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-jüdisch (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.