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
