SOURCE: Madison, Charles A. “Isaak Laybush Peretz: The Father of Modern Yiddish Literature.” In Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers, pp. 99-133. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1968.

[In the following essay, Madison focuses on Peretz's major works, also discussing the themes Peretz explored in his stories and poems.]

There are evidences that Peretz's family was one of the Sephardic group of Spanish Jews who settled in Poland not long after their expulsion in 1492. His immediate ancestors were anti-Hasidic, and a number of them were scholars and businessmen of high repute. Although his parents were not as wealthy as their predecessors, they adhered to the family's charitable tradition.

Isaak Laybush, born in Zamoscz in 1852, received the usual training in Hebrew lore. Bright and thoughtful, he in his early teens exhibited feats of learning that gained him the plaudits reserved for a prodigy. Even at this time he was speculating about the meaning and end of life, digging to the depths of his being with the sharp nails of doubt. Wherever men congregated, he listened and pondered. At the time he appeared, as he remembered, with “little thin hands, and feet—like sticks; a large head and a wrinkled forehead; beneath—large, searching, groping, painfully questioning eyes.”

At the age of 15 a happy chance gave him access to a relatively large private library owned by one of the town's few intellectuals. There for the first time he saw books in languages other than Hebrew. He already had a smattering of Polish and Russian, and with the aid of translations and grammars soon acquired a reading knowledge of German and French. One can imagine with what avidity he read book after book—indiscriminately, enthusiastically, obliviously. Maimonides and Spinoza he had read in Hebrew; now he perused the work of non-Jewish philosophers, mostly German, and various works of science, so that his biblical concept of the world was dislodged by a view more consonant with modern thought. Fiction and poetry he read eagerly and uncritically, enjoying alike Dickens, Dumas, Sue, Shakespeare, Heine, and later poets and novelists. For months on end he lived in this new world, fascinating and unfamiliar. Like other naturally inclined writers, he was soon composing verses in Hebrew, Polish, and even Yiddish, much encouraged by an uncle whom he admired.

When Peretz was 18 he became engaged to the daughter of G. J. Lichtenfeld, an intellectual and mathematician. As was the custom at the time, the engaged couple did not meet until the day of their wedding, but that did not concern young Peretz in his eagerness to associate himself with a father-in-law of known enlightenment. Similarly, Lichtenfeld approved of the match when told by Peretz's uncle about his nephew's literary aspirations: “He writes and discards, writes and tears up, writes and burns up.” After their marriage in 1870 the young couple found themselves unsuited to each other. The girl, having had a secular education, considered herself culturally superior to her self-taught husband, and thought little of his literary endeavors. At her urging he studied bookkeeping and tried to earn a living at various business ventures—only to fail in each one. Divorce followed after five years of uncongeniality, and Peretz assumed the care of their son Lucian. He then went to Warsaw to study law, and in time developed a fair practice in Zamoscz. In 1878 he remarried, this time happily.

Peretz began to write in Yiddish during adolescence, but destroyed most of it. His Hebrew poems were published in the early 1870's and were well received. Increase in the number of clients and his civic activities kept him from writing for nearly a decade, and not until 1887 did he again publish some Hebrew poems. The next year an envious competitor denounced him to the government as a socialist, and he lost the right to practice law. When he appealed for reinstatement to the minister of justice in St. Petersburg, the latter dismissed him with the curt statement: “That's nothing; one fewer Jewish lawyer in Russia.”

In financial need, Peretz turned to writing. Embittered by social and personal harassment, he decided against writing in Polish. Yiddish continued to appeal to him. As early as 1886 he said: “In that language are hidden the weeping of our parents, the outcries of many generations, the poison and the bitterness of history. It contains the dearest diamonds—Jewish tears which became hardened before they had dried.”

Learning that the Kiev maecenas Sholom Rabinovitch was planning to publish his Yiddish Folk Bibliotek and paid well for contributions, Peretz sent him “Monish” and several prose sketches. In an accompanying letter he explained that he had hitherto burned everything written in Jargon, and that he wrote only for his own pleasure. “If I think of the reader at all, I think of him as one of a higher level of society, one who reads and has studied in a living language.” A little later he confessed that, having read very little of Yiddish writing, he had confused Mendele with Sholom Aleichem. “I am ashamed to say it, but in our town there is not one book in Jargon, and I am in no condition to buy any at present. … I heartily permit you to revise my work and the expressions which are not intelligible to Russian and Lithuanian Jews. But please be careful with the meter.” He proposed that the two of them, “to enrich the language,” publish a book on psychology based on Wilhelm Wundt's work and studies in Jewish history, especially for women readers—but nothing came of that.

When “Monish” appeared in print, Peretz was greatly annoyed about Sholom Aleichem's several emendations; referring to the generous fee of 150 rubles, he stated: “None of your honey, and none of your sting.” Although he also contributed to the second volume of Yiddish Folk Bibliotek, he and Sholom Aleichem did not become friends. The latter, the realist, failed to appreciate Peretz's symbolic mysticism, and Sholom Aleichem's humor was too close to the marketplace to meet the poet's high literary notions. Several subsequent incidents served further to keep them apart. It was only years later, when Sholom Aleichem read Peretz's Intimate Folk Tales, that he wrote to him: “I approached the mirror and slapped myself twice for not knowing up to now how to appreciate your worth!” This gesture brought about a happy reconciliation.

With Mendele, Peretz was also quite aloof, and later credited him only as being “the first”: “He was the first who showed love and respect for his artistic instrument—the Yiddish word—and kept it pure … and was therefore the first to create a Yiddish style.”

In 1890, without employment and in want, Peretz eagerly accepted the offer of Jan Bloch, the Warsaw philanthropist, to study the life of the Jews in the small Polish towns. He and Dinesohn, with whom he soon became intimate, visited community after community, gathering statistical data and observing cultural customs. His report, later issued as Travel Pictures, was an illuminating delineation of the life led by the mass of Polish Jews. Dr. Eliashev said that “he wrote about the towns he visited with the objectivity of the investigator. He found everything in a state of degeneracy—impoverished, listless, dead.” Late in 1890, back in Warsaw, Peretz was engaged as bookkeeper by the Gmineh, the Jewish Civic Center, at a meager salary—540 rubles a year, gradually increased to 2400—and kept the job to the end of his life in 1915.

Peretz in 1890 was in the prime of life. Of medium height, with broad shoulders and a large head, he impressed all who met him with the extraordinary brilliance of his dark eyes. His bearing was aristocratic, proud, without the least semblance of the ghetto Jew. He was energetic of movement and unstable of mood. Devoted and friendly, he soon attracted neophyte writers, awed youths who came to him as truth seekers and drew comfort and encouragement from this high-minded mentor. His home became the cynosure of the young as well as of older writers. Niger wrote: “This house, Tzigliana No. 1, became a center for Jewish radical thought. There the foundation was laid for Yiddish literature not as a means, but as an end in itself. Out of that house came forth the thought of Yiddish, the poetic rebirth of Hasidism, the love of the folksong and the folktale.”

He was ever concerned for the welfare of the mass of Jews, and often castigated wealthier Jews for being less civic-minded than he thought they should be. At the outbreak of World War I he suffered deeply when many Jews were driven out of their homes, and helped as many as he could with food and shelter. Yet he was for the most part subject to the loneliness of the lofty, with the gentle Dinesohn being his only intimate companion.

So extraordinary was his eminence among fellow Jews toward the end of his life that his funeral attracted the largest crowd in the history of Warsaw. Yet so antagonistic were the Poles toward the Jews in 1915 that not a word of his death appeared in the Polish press.

Peretz's intense Jewishness was as evident in his civic work as in his writing. He loved his people with the passion of the inspired leader, and with the zeal of the prophet he sought to exalt them body and soul. As all intellectual reformers of the time, he wanted to free them from their superstitious beliefs, abject meekness, and enervated passivity. Proud Jew that he was, he resented the bartering of self-respect for a bit of bread. Believing also that “the old rabbinic bat had spread its wings over the confused populace,” he attacked the orthodox religious leaders as enemies of progress.

He wanted the Jews to become self-sufficing and self-respecting human beings, and appealed to his fellow intellectuals to help make them so. In 1891 he published two issues of his Yiddish Bibliotek as a means to that end. In the preface to the first volume he wrote:

Our program is education. We want to educate the people: to turn fools into wise men; to make intelligent persons out of fanatics; out of idlers and luftmenschen—workingmen, useful, honest people who work for themselves and thereby benefit society. … We say simply: We Jews are as human as all human beings! We have virtues, we have faults. We are neither demigods nor demons, only human. And human beings should educate themselves, become wiser, better, finer with every passing day.

His cry was not a voice in the wilderness. Reformers of the previous decades had been badly shaken by the pogroms of 1881 and the intensified anti-Semitism in the years thereafter. Only a few continued to disdain Yiddish as a corrupt dialect and to maintain that Jews must use the language of the land in which they lived. A good many had turned Zionist and argued for a national revival of Hebrew. More and more, however, realized that they must go direct to the people, speak to them in the one language they knew, and help them to acquire the culture and status of modern Europeans. Peretz, one of their leaders, said that “whoever wants to know the people, and teach them, must know how to speak and write in Yiddish.” Yet even he was too much the sensitive artist to employ that tongue in its current crudity. In 1888 he had explained to Sholom Aleichem his position in connection with his use of a literary Yiddish:

As we shall express new ideas, we must give them new forms, new expressions, since the old garment doesn't fit the new one; the expressions will at first appear strange, but in the end they will penetrate the reader's mind and enrich his intellect. For that reason I have made no effort to limit my thoughts and to curb them to the common speech. On the contrary, I have resorted not to his speech but to the language that best expresses the riches most strongly, so that the uneducated reader might educate himself.

Eager to purify and enrich the Yiddish language, he castigated assimilationists who continued to advocate its replacement by Russian or Polish. When Jewish writers and intellectuals, at a meeting in his honor in St. Petersburg, spoke only in Russian, he jumped up and exclaimed: “I cannot, I will not. … You insult me with your Russian speeches. It is an insult that you should speak to me in a foreign tongue! It is an insult to the people!” The outburst nullified his mission to raise funds for a Yiddish theater, but he did not regret it.

To those who urged Hebrew as the national language he was more conciliatory. “Jargon makes no pretense to replace the mother's position in a Jewish home; that position belongs and must belong to Hebrew; … Jargon is only a nurse who wishes to teach how to walk, sit, speak.” Later, however, he made Yiddish the equal of Hebrew. In 1894 he wrote:

It is about time for the intelligentzia to relegate to the old archives the questions, Is Yiddish a language? Can there be a language without a grammar? Can a patchwork of different languages and of different periods be called a language? This is merely the old obfuscating cavil which will always be pecked at by the barren hens of our literature; the true intelligentzia must realize that Yiddish is a fact that came not of our volition and will not disappear over night at our desire … that a language is whatever means people use to communicate with one another, that four million beings who speak and understand only Yiddish are also people, and that whoever wishes to educate them must accept their language as the means.

At the same time he addressed himself to Yiddish writers to urge linguistic improvement: “We want to pull up the weeds by the roots, to cut down the briars, to burn the tares, to sow the pure grain of human ideas, human feelings, and knowledge.”

His influence on Jewish intellectuals in Poland as well as on aspiring young Yiddish writers everywhere was enormous. Up to the end of his life he remained their inspiring leader. His views and opinions were eagerly solicited, and he imparted them generously and forthrightly on the platform and in his considerable journalistic writings, both in Yiddish and in Hebrew. He discussed every topic of current interest with cogent effectiveness. With poignant satire and cutting irony he fought the anti-Semitic eruptions of the time, making mock in particular of Polish diatribes, exposing their deceitful pretensions, and encouraging Jews to insist on their ancient and just rights. He readily entered into polemics with Polish publicists who connived at the injustices done to his people, and demolished their claims with pertinently trenchant arguments.

With equal forcefulness and on a larger scale, Peretz fought the shams, fanaticism, and intolerance within the Jewish community. Like Mendele and Sholom Aleichem, he described the life of the Polish Jews as he found it at the time: the old order crumbling at the edges and the new one struggling to emerge. He wrote about the prevailing poverty, the lack of work opportunities; how hunger caused some to resort to fantastic ways of gaining a few pennies. The following excerpt indicates how one Jew reacted to his precarious way of life:

Money, praised be His Name, I have none! Neither I nor the Jews around here! Except perhaps the reformed Jews in the large cities. … We have no money! A trade I have none—neither did my grandfather! Nevertheless, at the will of His Blessed Name, I live; and for over fifty years at that! And—when it is necessary to marry off a child, one does it without means as well. …

Closer questioning elicited the information that this Jew was simultaneously a justice of the peace, an agent, a trader, a marriage broker, and a messenger. From all these occupations he eked out a bare existence, yet he was considered by the less fortunate as well-to-do.

Most of these Jews were Hasidim whose appearance matched their medievally oriented minds. Their clothes were of a peculiar pattern—obliquely similar to the garments worn by feudal Poles; their beards were untouched by steel or comb; their ear curls sometimes reached below their chins. Extremely pious, they considered spiritual concentration more important than providing for their families, so that many depended upon their wives to attend to material needs. Since to enter Paradise was their dearest goal, they fought desperately against the “godless” western ideas undermining the piety of their children.

Thus Peretz found them in the 1890's. Their economic plight aroused his sympathy, but their religious fanaticism made him caustic. His satire was directed especially at the town rabbi, presumed shepherd of his people, keeper of His holy laws. He depicted him as a mere caricature of his predecessors, the patriarchs who guided and comforted their charges, with his interest limited to ritual questions and narrow interpretation of obsolescent laws. He was equally critical of the Hasidic rabbis, whose pretense to miraculous powers he considered pseudo-religious charlatanry. In numerous articles and sketches Peretz sought to nullify their influence upon the mass of Jews.

He was also condemnatory of urbanized Jews who were flagrantly overreaching themselves in their endeavor to attain social status. With sarcastic acerbity he exposed their myopic behavior and the pathetic futility of their assimilationist striving. He disdained their shedding the good with the bad of their Jewish inheritance: their loss of racial dignity, fawning and cringing in the presence of gentiles, posing as “Poles of the Mosaic faith.” His aim was to bring harmony within the fold of Israel: to waken in his fellow Jews pride of self and of their people, to bring understanding and sympathy among the several classes of Jews, and to lead all of them to a higher level of culture.

An instance of his position was his manner of handling the question of circumcision, much debated at the time. Regarding the rite as an ancient custom, he pointed out to the pious Jews how dangerous it was to base religion on a sacrificial act. Aware, however, of the futility of reasoning with entrenched orthodoxy, and eager to unite both groups in the face of external oppression, he cautioned the opponents of circumcision to keep distinct the ends and the means:

Pious Jews are a suppressing majority. To the pious Jew everything is holy. The pettiest law recorded in Hebrew lore, the most insignificant and foolish custom—the entire Diasporal rope that winds from generation to generation around his neck and throttles and almost chokes him out of his breath—he regards as holy! Yet one must confess—tragic as it may be and strange as it may sound—that this shortening of breath, this opiating of the Jewish life-pulse, have greatly helped the Jews to withstand and to endure the coal-black and blood-red times of the Inquisition, the massacres, and the like periods of woe that no other nation could survive. … Therefore, as the large majority of the Jews consider circumcision as an exclusive act of adherence to the Jewish people, it is necessary for each free-thinking Jew, as a Jew, to submit in order not to be torn from the tribe. … On the other hand, as a free thinker he has the right, and in more propitious times the duty, to fight for such a conviction with all the power of the explicit word.

In his journalistic writings Peretz was the serious and spirited social reformer. As a polemicist he exposed wrongs within the Jewish community and defended it from its overt and covert enemies. In this phase of his writing he was the inspired truth-seeker, hater of sham, contemner of servility, enemy of dead tradition, advocate of the living ideal, and the eloquent and effective Jewish leader.

Peretz was a publicist of necessity but an artist by inclination. Were he not living at a time when modern industry and liberated rationalism were bringing havoc and harassment to the Jews of Eastern Europe, so that their vicissitude became his vicissitude and their plight his plight, his writing might have assumed a gemlike wholeness instead of being sparklingly fragmentary. Consciously avoiding the seclusion of the ivory tower, however, he devoted his charged feelings to his didactic and polemical efforts. He also sought to achieve his purpose by fictional means, and provided a symbolic moral in a number of his stories.

In one sketch a garrulous furrier philosophizes about the shtreimel—the fur hat traditionally worn by many rabbis and Hasidim. He argues sarcastically, and brings up a number of pertinent incidents, to demonstrate that people respect the shtreimel rather than those wearing it—reminding one of Thackeray's famous cartoon of Louis XIV. In another tale a vacillating rabbi of Chelm is caricatured as a little innocuous “man satisfied with his mite and without a temper.” When a certain Yekel is beaten several times by a drunken churl who serves the Jews on the Sabbath, he complains to the rabbi and is each time pacified by word rather than deed. When Yekel is beaten in the synagogue yard, the rabbi becomes alarmed, fearing a threat to the entire congregation. Calling a meeting of his parishioners, he explains the situation and concludes: “If I have any voice in the congregation, and if my advice were honestly to be requested, I should say the following: Yekel should first of all, even tomorrow at dawn, leave town with the help of God. … And in order to save the congregation from further danger the peasant should receive an increase in pay.” And Peretz the moralist cannot refrain from adding: “You laugh? And yet somewhat of the spirit of the Chelm rabbi is to be found in everyone of us.”

Peretz championed the rights of the Jewish woman. Her lowly position in Jewish life—ignored as a girl and merely tolerated as wife and mother—seemed to him a barbaric condition not to be endured. In poem and story he wrote caustically of her role as sole provider, her forced meekness, and her work in the sweatshop. He was particularly incensed at the practice of keeping girls in poor homes without schooling, and of giving those in wealthier urban homes a completely non-Jewish education. He relates that in “a school for Jewish girls in a large Jewish city … whose mothers wear the prescribed wig and whose fathers dress in satin caftans and fur hats,” a teacher asked who knew Yiddish or the Hebrew alphabet. “All were quiet.” This situation is treated in “The Outcast.” A girl is given lessons in foreign languages but not in either Hebrew or Yiddish. Ignored by her father and indulged by her mother, she gives her time to reading romances and dreaming of adventure. One day she is attracted to a Polish youth, elopes with him, and is converted. Her action drives her pious parents to a premature death. Years later she meets her brother and her mood is repentent yet accusatory:

You Jews are guilty! What did I know of your bloody struggle with them? You knew it; you were taught in kheder. My books did not mention a word of it. … I did not betray you—I did not know you! I knew nothing of your sorrow, I was never told a word of it. … Your secrets were never disclosed to me. … Why did you not tell me of your love—of the love that feeds upon blood? Why did you not show me your beauty, your eternal blood-stained beauty? Beauty, love, spirit—you kept to yourselves, for men only. … You cast us out!

These words are Peretz's, giving voice to his indignation. The dangerous disparity between the pious gabardined youth and the sentimental Polonized girl worried him. At the end of the story he added this italicized coda: “Let her be judged by Him who is over nations and their complex bloody struggles.”

The Jewish girl who remained within the fold sometimes found life a succession of sorrows. Usually married to a youth whose chief virtue was knowledge of Hebrew lore, she had her hair shaved off on the day of her wedding and was thereafter expected to assume the confining practices of the pious Jewess. “In the Postchaise” tells her story from the point of view of a neighbor, an intelligent Pole:

For hours together she would stand by the window, hands on her breast, and gaze sadly at us or at the stars with tear-stained eyes. We saw that she was always alone—your men never seem to have any time—always sad and wistful. Her sorrow was imprinted on her pale face. … She wanted to live, to love and be loved. … No, you can say what you will, this injustice often happens among you: you sell your daughters. … It is true, in time they become accustomed to this life, in time they forget. … They are pious, they are good and patient. … But who can count the bitter tears that fall upon their grieved faces before their eyes run dry? Who can calculate their heart pangs before they become reconciled to a living death?

Again it is Peretz speaking, overstating the truth perhaps, his anger heightened by compassion.

Years of poverty and drudgery, of worry and grief, slowly transform the young married Jewess into a servile and subservient wife. Harsh as is the lot of her husband, hers is worse: she must bear his mastery in addition to providing for their home, for the pious Jew must study to prepare his soul for Paradise. This aspect of Jewish life is described ironically in such stories as “In the Basement,” “The Anger of a Jewish Woman,” and “Mendel Breines.” The first is an idyllic tale of a newlywed couple who love each other shyly yet ardently in the midst of poverty and squalor. Occupying one corner of a basement, with the other corners taken up by families as poor as themselves, they have no privacy. The wife is especially perturbed by an old hag who cannot understand how any woman can keep from berating her husband. Since her husband, a teacher has only three pupils, the cloud of poverty darkens her life. To eke out their existence, she begins to sell onions. However much she loves her husband, she cannot drive from her mind the wizened face of the hag who no doubt was once a tender and devoted bride.

In “The Anger of a Jewish Woman” the husband's arrogance, his indifference to the needs of the family, and his wife's inability to earn enough for their needs, brings their existence to a pathetic pass. Angered by his seeming disinterest at a time when they are with a sick child and without food, she interrupts his study to urge him to do something about their plight. Her brazenness shocks him:

Listen thou woman. … Doest thou know how grievously one sins by interrupting someone at study? Not to permit your husband to study, ha?! And who provides for the bird? Always disturbing the Lord, always temptation, always this world. Foolish woman—shrew! Not to permit a husband to study deserves Gehenna!

Only the piteous cry of her feverish child thwarts her desperate attempt to hang herself.

The wife is an adequate provider in “Mendel Breines,” only she works herself to the bone in pampering her stupid husband. Although he appreciates her care, he selfishly accepts her coddling without question and is very much surprised when she dies from sheer exhaustion.

In these tales Peretz depicts the life of the orthodox Jews vividly and realistically, yet their traits, customs, and attitudes are seen from the point of view of the social reformer. Like Mendele, he speaks out vociferously against the blemishes and inadequacies he finds within the Jewish community; as a consequence he expresses himself artistically in a minor key.

Poverty being so egregiously prevalent among the Jews of his time, Peretz, like other Jewish writers, could not but deal with it at some length. And like them he stressed the Jews' ability to survive as a result of their spiritual faith and personal perseverance. Two of his best-known stories—“The Messenger” and “Bontche Silent”—are at once noteworthy and typically Peretzian. The first describes the death of an old messenger. On his way to a neighboring town in the thick of a winter storm to deliver a valuable packet, he feels a pain in his left side and his inadequately clothed body is half-frozen. Yet he trudges on, intent on reaching his destination and delivering his parcel. Gusts of wind draw tears from his aching eyes, swirls of snow impede his steps, but he persists and promises to buy himself a pair of spectacles with his first savings.

Incidents from his past life flit through his consciousness like little sprites. As a child he was drafted into the army of Nicholas I, and for 35 years remained in the depths of arctic Russia—25 of them with gun in hand. All these years, although he had hardly met a Jew and had to undergo the regimen of the army, he had clung resolutely to memories of his early youth. When at last he returned to his native town he began to practice the piety he remembered. He married and worked as a night watchman. Dire poverty turned his wife into a shrew, and she made life miserable for him. Yet she cared for him in her way, and when there was no food in the house she worried more for his sake than for hers. After years of struggle she died of malnutrition. Their four children drifted away, and he remained alone, working as a messenger and reading Psalms when free. He never complained, never grumbled.

“Meantime the frost increases. His beard and mustache are iced. Still his body is not uncomfortable and his head feels quite warm, with drops of sweat on his brow. Only his feet become more and more cold.” He would like to rest a bit, only he is ashamed: it is the first time in his life that he is finding it difficult to walk a distance of ten miles at a stretch. His feet grow heavier and colder with every step. “Arguing contrariwise, he thinks to himself: What if I do rest? A minute, half a minute! Perhaps I should. Let me but try! My feet have been obeying me for so long, I shall obey them also this once!” He sits down. Pains come shooting to his head and heart, and at the thought of sickness he fears most for the valuable packet. Dusk approaches. He commands himself to rise, and in the hallucination which comes over him believes himself to have risen. His mind wanders, and he sees himself at home, with all his children visiting at once. Their embraces are too vehement.

“Easy there, children! Easy, do not press me so hard! I am no longer a young man; I am over seventy! … Easy, you're choking me, easy, children … old bones! Easy, I have money in my bosom! I am, praised be the Lord, trusted with money! … Enough, children, enough. …” And it was enough. … With his hand in his bosom pocket he remained stark. …

Here Peretz is primarily the artist. In its eleven pages this story gives us an unforgettable portrayal of a sturdy septuagenarian of simple and deep piety. The narrative is restrained, humorous, and persuasive, progressing with the sure strides of subtle art. In his death the docile, honest, and tenacious old man comes alive in the reader's imagination.

“Bontche Silent” presents another aspect of the same type of Jew. On earth the meek and uncomplaining porter was a human zero, and his death was entirely unnoticed. “Bontche lived in silence, and silently he died; he passed through our world like a shadow. … A shadow! His image was impressed on no one's mind, in no man's heart; he left not an imprint!” In the seven heavens, however, his death caused a sensation. “Young angels with brilliant eyes, golden wire-wrought wings and silver slippers flew rejoicing toward Bontche! The flutter of wings, the patter of slippers, and the happy laughter from the young, fresh, rosy mouths filled the heavens and reached to the Blessed Seat, and God Himself knew of Bontche's arrival.”

Timid Bontche is overawed by this reception, thinking it a fantastic dream. “And his fear increases when he sees the diamond and alabaster floor of the Hall of Judgment! ‘And my feet stand on such a floor! … Who knows what rich man, what rabbi, what saint they have in mind—when he comes, I'll get it, all right!’” He does not realize that the Angel for the Defense has begun to tell the story of his life. Only as he recognizes incidents from his own wretched existence does he become persuaded that it is about him after all. The Angel relates how Bontche was tormented by a shrewish stepmother; how, in a winter night, he was driven from home by a drunken father; how he hungered and suffered and overworked; how he saved a rich man from certain death and was rewarded with work and a bride who was already with child; how he was betrayed by his wife, mistreated by her son, and later mortally wounded by his “benevolent” employer; and how under all these conditions he remained silent!

He was silent even in the hospital, where one may cry out! He was silent even when the doctor would not approach his bed without a fee, and when the nurse would not change his sheet without pay! He was silent when dying, and silently he emitted his last breath. … Not a word against God, not a word against man! Dixi!

The Angel for the Prosecution makes several attempts to speak, then says: “Gentlemen! He was silent. I too will be silent!”

The Lord then speaks softly to Bontche, calls him “my dear Bontche,” and tells him he may have whatever he desires, for he is worthy of what is most precious. When assured of this several times, Bontche, whose heart weeps from joy, says smilingly: “If this be so, I would like every morning a hot bun with fresh butter.” Peretz concluded: “The Judge and the Angels lowered their heads in shame. The Prosecutor laughed.”

Ostensibly the old messenger and Bontche are similar conceptions. Both are simple subservient creatures, ill abused, depicted with like sympathy. In the first story, however, the emphasis is on portrayal of character—the intuitive expression of the quintessence of a docile human soul. Bontche, on the other hand, becomes a springboard for social satire and religious irony. The meek porter's life is made a protest against man's abuse of man, an oppressed man's cry for human justice. There is something Christlike about Bontche. His abject suffering is dramatized to make him crushed, blood-stained, and forgiving. Yet Peretz also makes mock of his meekness, intimating that, in order to be heard, it is sometimes necessary to shout—especially on earth. As the Lord tells Bontche: “You yourself perhaps did not know that you could cry, and that your cry could have caused the wall of Jericho to tumble and collapse. You yourself did not know of your latent power. …”

Bontche's fatalistic attitude irritated Peretz because it symbolized the pious Jew's complete credence in life after death, his belief that suffering on earth would be compensated by pleasures in Paradise. Peretz knew only too well that the resulting meekness and self-abnegation were suicidal in an unconscionable world, especially as the faith that had kept the Jews alive for centuries was losing its hold upon them. Yet he loved the poor porter and the old messenger and sympathized with their naive piety, artless minds, and simple wholesomeness, and his portrayal made them memorable additions to Yiddish literature.

Peretz was no Hasid. “Inwardly I was and remained a Jew, with a Jewish, more or less clear biblical outlook on the world.” He became a publicist out of love for his people, but was always essentially a poet and romanticist. “To current facts,” he stated, “even in private life, I react weakly or not at all. Facts for the most part are trivial: motives—mixed and confused, colors—gray, tones—loud, lines—heavy. … In recollection they become refined and purified.” Disdaining the ordinary, the commonplace, the little people all about him, he yearned for the heroic, the noble, the spiritually exalted. Critical as he was of dogmatic piety and dry legalism, which in combination were burdening the Jewish community with a pernicious lethargy, he was among the first to delve into the spiritual sources of Jewish life. In time he discovered in Jewish folklore and the ideals of Hasidism the warm spring of emotional Judaism.

If you have no God, you look for idols, and these give no Torah. Our road is back, back to our past, back to the Bible. Speaking for myself, what we have to do is to find in Jewish life what has been created by and belongs to the people, what the people relate about themselves—the Hasidim and the rest. The Yiddish writer has to take all this rich material and work it up in his own spirit. That is Yiddish literature.

The Jewish spirit, product of centuries of external oppression and religious concentration, combines in its full manifestation both pathology and profundity, grotesqueness and greatness. In depicting what he termed “the bloody beauty of our Diaspora existence” in his Hasidic and folkloric stories, Peretz extracted its inward essence and ignored its external excrescences. He was fascinated by the poetic personalities and romantic exuberance of the founders of Hasidism—their ecstatic love of God, mystic communion with Jehovah, lowly humaneness, and ethical righteousness. Without accepting their ideology and conceits, he gave artistic expression to their ideals, which had become part of Jewish folklore. The more he familiarized himself with the rich legends and reveries associated with these wonder-working rabbis, the more he perceived the distilled beauty of these folk tales—“the magic and the truth of art itself.” In retelling them in his inimitable style he gave Yiddish literature a new song of songs of the Jewish spirit.

For all his rational European veneer, Peretz was deeply drawn to the beatitude of exalted revery, the splendor of the soul communing with the Godhead. Even in his mature years, in the presence of intimate friends, he would sometimes hum a Hasidic tune without words which repeated itself endlessly. To him song was not mere musical expression but symbolic of the loftiness of life. One of his rabbis thus explains its significance:

There is a song that depends upon words: such a song is of very low degree. … There is one of a higher degree: a song that sings of itself, altogether without words—only music! But even this song requires sound … and lips through which to pass! And lips are matter! And a voice, though of delicate matter, is matter still! … The true song sings of itself and without sound. … It sings from within, from the heart, from one's very being! …

Peretz's own generation was very far from such true song. Of a proud, aristocratic nature, he suffered to see how shriveled and shrunken the spiritual life of the urbanized Jew had become. To imbue him with a pride in his Jewish origin, he turned to the great Hasidic rabbis and the sources of Jewish folklore for his literary material—sources woven with the golden threads of myth and legend. He stressed the rabbis' mystic love of sheer song, their belief that all of life was one song:

For each man is a musical instrument, and the life of man is a song, whether a joyous or a sad song, and when he completes his song it flies out of his body, and this song—that is, his soul—joins anew the great chorus before His Blessed Seat. … And woe to the man who lives without his song; he lives without a soul, and his life is a screech and a sigh—it is no life.

To awaken this song within the soul of the modern Jew, Peretz eulogized the spiritual quality of Hasidism. “Between Two Mountains” contrasts the essential difference between the poeticized Hasid and the orthodox ritualist. The latter regards religion as a relationship between God and man. He prays alone and in silence even in the synagogue. His attitude is matter-of-fact: he believes that by faithfully performing his religious obligations he will gain Paradise. Not so the Hasid, to whom religion is an exciting, joyous experience. He envisages God not as a stern Jehovah but as a loving Father. In the synagogue he prays as a child amidst the children of the Almighty; he prays aloud, as to a father, waxing enthusiastic and forgetting his worldly self in spiritual ecstasy. In this story the ritualist rabbi is the older of the two, very learned, stern, cold, rigorous, zealous, and proud; the Hasid, equally learned, once a pupil of the other, is mild, warm, soft, sympathetic, and forgiving. Having left his former teacher because his soul could find no breathing space in ritualism, he now tells him:

Your teaching, rabbi, is overfine! Without compassion, without pity! Therefore it is without joy, without free breath … like cast iron; iron laws, copper statues … and very abstruse, fit only for scholars, for the few. … Tell me, rabbi, what have you for the people—for the woodcutter, the butcher, the laborer, the ordinary Jew? … Especially for the sinful Jew? … To speak plainly, your teaching is hard, hard and dry, because it is only the body and not the soul of the Torah!

He then shows the older rabbi the results of his Hasidic teaching. The day being Pentecost, he takes him to the porch and asks him to look on the green bordering the town. There groups of his followers bask in the sun; poor and rich alike are rejoicing in the lap of God's meadow.

All groups are gazing with wonderfully eager eyes at the rabbi on the porch. … The thirsty eyes suck the light upon the rabbi's face; and the more light they suck the louder they sing … louder and louder … more lustily and holier. … And each group sings its own song, and songs and voices intermingle in the air, and only one song reaches the rabbi's porch, one tune … as if all are singing only one song. And everything is singing: the sky, the lost souls, the earth beneath, and the soul of the world, everything is singing!

“It is time for afternoon prayers!” just then exclaims the ritualist, and the charm of the scene vanishes.

Peretz was of course more interested in effect than in fact. He exaggerated the rapture of one and the rigor of the other to make the point more eloquently. For he is here presenting not so much the differing philosophies of two rabbis as he is his conception of them, imbuing Hasidism with romantic glamor because of its innate emotional appeal.

The rich folklore he uncovered—tales, legends, anecdotes—concerns largely wonder-working rabbis and secret saints who were endowed with supernatural powers which they often employed to right wrongs and reward the just. Pious Jews, Hasidim in particular, depend upon this intercession and ask for it in time of affliction or personal sorrow; the miraculous manner in which these requests are granted forms the basis of a number of his stories. In all of them man is judged not by his appearance but by his acts, and not so much by results as by intentions. Each folktale is told with great skill and verbal beauty. In each Peretz probes the deep recesses of human frailty, human goodness, and human greatness. Whether they treat of Hasidic miracles, incidents relating to humble yet lovable men and women, or flights of poetic nobility and folk fantasy, each adds to the quality and scope of his artistic achievement.

“Berl the Tailor” is a typical Hasidic tale. This poor worker gets mad at God and refuses to serve Him. The all-knowing Rabbi Levi Isaak learns of Berl's rebellion from his communion with Heaven. Before Yom Kippur he sends for Berl and the latter tells him, tailorlike, that he is angry with God because He does not provide him with an adequate living. The rabbi agrees with the justice of the complaint, obtains Berl's readiness to forgive God, and God in turn forgives Berl.

“At the Head of the Dying” tells of a pious usurer who dies and is taken by the Black Angel, while a less pious Jew who was always helpful to others is taken to Heaven when he dies. At Heaven's gate, however, the latter asks the Angel leading him: “And what will I do there, Angel? There where none needs my soul, my heart, nor my sympathetic tear, nor my word of comfort, nor my hand to lift one from the pit?” As the Angel offers him no satisfactory answer, the soul decides to go with the Black Angel to the abode of the sinners.

In “Seven Good Years” the Prophet Elijah tells a very poor but pious man that he can have seven years of riches now or toward the end of his life. The man consults his wife and agrees to have it now. Immediately he becomes a man of wealth. When the seven years pass, Elijah comes for an accounting. He is told that, as the steward of the gold in his possession, the man spent much on charity but took for himself only the tuition fees for his sons. Heaven then decrees that the good man may continue to keep the money.

“The Baal Shem Arranges a Match” concerns a pious Jew who is rich but childless. Supplicating Besht for his wife's fertility, he is told that he could have a child but would lose his wealth. He agrees, and the rabbi's promise is realized. Years later, reduced to beggary, the Master of the Divine Name advises him to go from town to town until he comes to one where the rabbi's name is unknown. In a town in Germany he meets a Jew who has never heard of the founder of Hasidism, but invites him for the Sabbath. It happens that this German Jew had gained his prosperity from the lumber his impoverished guest had lost in a storm years previously. In their conversation the host confides that his daughter swoons when introduced to a prospective groom, and the guest urges him to visit the miracle-making Besht. As the two of them and the troubled girl reach the rabbi's court, they are met by the son of the poor man; the girl is at once attracted to him. The rabbi then explains how he had prearranged these events, and marriage ensues.

“Yokhanan the Watercarrier” tells of the superiority of the pious over the learned. The protagonist is one of the 36 secret saints who, legend has it, keep the world from destruction. He is poor, unlearned, and supplies the synagogue scholars with water—a task he volunteers willingly out of his respect for learning. He himself reads the Psalms when free.

There are some scholars from whose study a fresh odor arises, as of new-baked bread: that is a simple student, innocent of heart; and there are some of higher degree from whom a perfume comes as of new apples; and still others who remind one of the flowers of the field, and the highest are like precious spices.

Yokhanan loves all except one from whom he smells the black pitch of Cabala, and deliberately avoids him. The rabbi in the synagogue notices this and soon forces Yokhanan to confess his reason for doing so. One night the rabbi is visited in a dream by his long-departed father and urged “to put out the fire.” On awaking he notices flames surrounding the hut occupied by the Cabala scholar. Yokhanan is already at the rabbi's door, axe in hand. Together they approach the hut and find it filled with evil spirits celebrating the scholar's wedding with Lilith. Yokhanan splits her head, the scholar is carried off by the evil spirits, and the flames die down.

In another story Reb Yehiel, a generous philanthropist, comes home one day and finds a Jew about to hide under his coat two silver candlesticks. Assuming rightly that the poor man had come for a loan for Passover or to marry off a daughter, and was tempted to steal, he acts as if unaware of the misdeed and takes the candlesticks from the man's bosom as if to evaluate them as a basis for a loan. “I'll tell you what,” he says to the shaken and confused man. “I'll simply lend you 35—all right, all right, I'll make it 40 rubles. … And when the time comes you'll pay me back.”

“At the Risk of One's Life” is set in ancient Palestine. A pious and highly learned head of a Safed yeshiva is approached by a youth who is anxious to study, but had been cursed with forgetfulness by the head of the Jerusalem yeshiva because the youth's sophistry and arrogance had put an honest scholar to shame. He interests the wise rabbi and is permitted to join the other students despite his locked memory. Handsome and winsome even in his torn garments, which he refuses to cast off in his earnest effort at expiation, he soon attracts the rabbi's beautiful daughter. Although the rabbi has long sought a husband for her and has rejected many fine youths who wished to marry her, he finds himself favoring the unfortunate student. One day, understanding the speech of animals, he overhears one serpent telling another that he was sent to poison the student, as it was fated, on the eighth day after the wedding. The rabbi is upset to think that his daughter should be widowed so soon after her marriage, but she accepts her fate and seeks to give her life to save her lover's. On the appointed day she puts on his garment, enters the garden, and is bitten. Her soul rises upward, but the error is quickly discovered. Her soul is immediately returned to her body and her husband permitted to live.

The bare bones of these stories impart not a whit of the poetic flavor and verbal beauty with which Peretz has fleshed them. These and other narratives of similar content possess a literary quality and imaginative depth found only in distinguished fiction. What heightens their worth to the Yiddish reader is the felicity with which Peretz treats the spiritual essence of Hasidism and Jewish folklore. The following two stories illustrate these qualities even more emphatically.

“If Not Higher” tells of a Hasidic rabbi who, during the week before the Holy Days, disappears for a time every morning. His followers think:

Where could he be? Presumably in Heaven! Little business does a rabbi have to attend to before God during these fearful days? Jews, without an evil eye, are in need of work, of peace, of health, of desirable marriages, of goodness and piety, and their sins are many. And Satan with his thousand eyes sees from one end of the world to the other. And he sees and accuses and prosecutes. … And who should help them if not the rabbi?

A Lithuanian Jew, a non-Hasid, who has recently settled in the town, mocks at the idea of the rabbi visiting Heaven. Even Moses, he argues, could not enter Heaven. Being a stubborn Litvak, he resolves to ascertain where the rabbi does go—perhaps with the idea of exposing him. One night he hides himself under the rabbi's bed. Early the next morning he sees to his astonishment that the rabbi dons coarse peasant garments and leaves the house very quietly, taking an axe with him. Following him at a distance, curious and excited, the Litvak sees the rabbi walk quickly to a nearby wood, chop down a tree, split it into firewood, tie it into a bundle, and carry it to a shack housing a sick widow. There, posing as a peasant woodcutter, the rabbi assures the poor woman that he is in no hurry for payment, and even starts the fire in order to keep her from leaving her sickbed. “The Lithuanian saw all that and became a Hasid. In aftertimes, when a Hasid would tell how the rabbi rises mornings during the week before Rosh Hashonah and flies to Heaven, the Lithuanian no longer laughed but admitted quietly, ‘If not even higher!’”

“Three Gifts” is the story of an ordinary Jew, some centuries back, whose sins and virtues were so equally proportioned that when he died his soul could be adjudged neither Paradise nor Gehenna. A merciful angel advised the luckless soul to return to earth and obtain three gifts with which to please the saints in Heaven—gifts revealing evidences of exceptionally fine deeds—and the saints would surely gain it entrance into Paradise.

For many years the soul hovered about the earth and met nothing of use to it. One day it came upon an unusual scene: robbers were in the process of plundering a rich Jew. One of them held a knife to his heart, ready to pierce it at the first move. But the Jew seemed quite peaceful, murmuring to himself, “The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken, praised be the Lord.” Suddenly he saw that one of the robbers was taking a small bag from a secret drawer. Forgetting all caution he cried out to leave it alone—when the knife pierced his heart and he fell dead. On opening the bag, expecting precious jewels, the robbers found only a bit of earth—earth from the Holy Land which the Jew was saving for his burial. A blood-stained grain was at once accepted as the first gift.

Again many years passed without an unusual event. The soul thought:

The world came as a living spring out of God's fount and flows and flows on with time. And the more it flows the more earth and dust it gathers into itself; it becomes more drab and less clean; fewer gifts can one find in it for Heaven. … The people appear smaller; driblets their virtues, dust their sins, good deeds not to be seen with the naked eye. …

Just then it heard a fanfare of trumpets. In a medieval city in Germany the beautiful daughter of a rabbi, having summarily been found guilty of witchcraft, was sentenced to be tied by the hair to the tail of a horse and dragged the length of the city at full speed. The girl accepted her fate bravely but asked for several pins with which to fasten her skirt to her bare legs in order not to expose her modesty. A blood-stained pin was accepted as a second gift.

Once more seasons and years followed in dreary succession. Again the soul was saddened by the mediocrity of man. Then it was attracted by sounds of a drum coming from a prison court, where a gantlet had been formed by two rows of soldiers in order to flog a Jew for some minor offense as he ran past them. The victim was half-naked but with a skullcap on his head. He began to hurry past the excited soldiers, accepting their blows without flinching. “And long whips swished in the air like evil spirits and wound about the body like snakes. And the blood spurted from the wasted body, and did not cease to spurt.” One whip was swung too high and swished the cap from the Jew's head. Becoming aware of it after he had taken several steps, he turned back amid the blows of the whips to pick it up so as not to commit the sin of bareheadedness. The blood-stained cap made up the third and final gift.

The story is told with simple and poignant grandeur. With consummate art Peretz depicts the human qualities he cherishes: self-sacrifice for an ideal, the spirit mastering the flesh, self-esteem ennobled by death. About each of the three victims he sings a song most beautifully. The biblical ardor of the narrative is achieved with an unusual economy of diction. Each phrase possesses high suggestiveness; the very dots impregnate the events with the poignancy of what remained untold.

Peretz was most of all a poet: a lover of verbal beauty, a singer of the mystical and the loftiness in man. His first Yiddish poem, “Monish,” gave the incipient literature a ballad whose beauty of thought and rhythm compared favorably with the best in current poetry in other languages. Monish was a most precocious youth, beautiful of body and incisive of mind—so pious and erudite as to endanger Satan's dominion. Fearful of his hold on mankind, the Evil One sends Lilith to lure the dangerous youth into sin. Her song and her pulchritude—symbolizing modern rationalism—are irresistible. Yielding to the advice of his Bad Angel rather than that of his Good Angel, Monish becomes Lilith's slave and victim. The poem was the first romantic ballad in Yiddish, wittily satirical, socially critical, with a mellifluent rhythm reminiscent of Heine but new to Yiddish verse.

He wrote numerous lyrics expressing his sympathy for the poor, indignation at injustice, and predilection to romance. His verse was wrought skillfully, possessed striking imagery, and was imbued with a rugged, if lofty, spirituality. Influenced early by Heine, he later regretted having emulated his “self-hatred.” Peretz came to feel that satire in verse did not become the Yiddish poet. To Yehoash he wrote in 1907: “Let's be prophets, leaders, not clowns.” This he assayed in his dramatic verse. In Polish oif der Kayt (Expiation) treats man's subjection to the world about him in lilting lines and inspired imagery. Night in the Old Marketplace is a tragedy of life and death, a work of philosophic fantasy symbolizing human striving and an innate yearning for salvation. Max Reinhardt, the famous German theatrical director, considered staging it and called it “a rare specimen of a universalist-symbolic play.”

Peretz's greatest work is undoubtedly The Golden Chain, a poetic drama of romantic imagination and philosophic profundity. More than any of his other writings it expresses his idealistic insight into Jewish spirituality. A rabbinic family is presented dramatically unto the fourth generation, with each forming a distinct stage in the Hasidic movement. Its ecstatic apotheosis appears in the person of Reb Shlome; his son Pinkhos upholds its rigid fanaticism; the grandson Moshe embodies its spiritual diminuendo; and its pathetic disintegration is manifested in Leah, Moshe's daughter. The continuity of the golden chain, broken by Moshe's inner weakness, is dutifully taken up by his son Jonathan. Miriam, Moshe's wife, is wistfully prophetic, and comments on the fate of the family with the finality of a Greek chorus.

Reb Shlome lived in the early years of the 19th century, his world not yet assailed by the cold knowledge of secular science. Intensely pious, he is governed by his emotions rather than his intellect, believing that God's grace lies in the heart and not in the mind. A very proud Jew, the conscientious shepherd of his flock, he feels responsible for the behavior of the least of its members. A fervid idealist, he seeks to enhance and ennoble the whole world with his visionary ideals. From his high eminence, however, he perceives only the puniness and prosiness of its swarm of pygmies: dwarfed and frozen little souls selfishly begging for petty favors “while a whole world hovers between life and death.”

As the ambassador of man to Heaven, he deplores his need to represent mean and puny beings, without ideals, dejected and woeful. Gradually he persuades himself that the world exists to no good purpose—that on its ruins a more ideal world might be built—and resolves to exert his supernatural powers to this effect.

When the drama opens, he refuses to declare the Sabbath at an end, though the stars have become visible, knowing that it can cease only with his evening prayers. He is an inspiring man: tall, gray, pale, with an unusually high forehead and large open eyes. A childlike smile wreathes his sorrow-shriveled face, and he is clothed in white except for a pointed black skullcap. His attitude deeply disturbs his congregation—everyone feels the dreadful weight of his resolution. Yet he remains adamant. With the fervor of an impassioned prophet he declares that the world must be freed from pain and fear.

The Sabbath shall continue—the Sabbath! Forcibly I will detain the Sabbath! … The world must be freed! … Let the Sabbath continue! The Sabbath! No plowing, no sowing, no building, no repairing, no trading, no traveling. … Let the world be destroyed! And we—we Sabbatic, we holy-spirited, we soul-purified Jews shall pass over the debris … to Him, to Him! Singing and dancing we shall go to Him! … And we do not ask and we do not beg—towering proud Jews are we! We shall tell Him: “We could wait no longer!”

His congregation of Jews are too foggy-minded to perceive his ecstatic vision. More earthly matters occupy them. They are concerned with their fleshpots; they are not interested in what lies beyond the pinnacles of Pisgah! They want the Sabbath to end so that they might begin to trade and travel; they need bread, not visions. So they turn to Shlome's son Pinkhos. He strikes them as better-fitted to represent them before God; he at least does not soar out of their myopic sight! They persuade him to usurp his father's rabbinate and declare the Sabbath at an end. When Reb Shlome learns of the betrayal of his “black son” he collapses and rises no more.

Members of the congregation soon learn to their sorrow that in opposing his father's ideals Reb Pinkhos has not lowered himself to their sordid level. He personifies the unswerving zealot—the fanatical aspect of Hasidism. He holds in contempt the sympathetic humaneness and ecstatic idealism of his father. Strict of manner and without pliancy, he banishes from his sight whatever is bright and sparkling. Even his vestments are black. In his zeal to gain Paradise he accepts with fatalistic rigidity the religious obligations and traditions of Hasidic ritual. As Miriam prophesies, his zealotry causes the house to be darkened by clouds from the West. Unlike his father in seeing not the sinner but sin, he is without mercy. Stronger-willed than the visionary Shlome, he almost destroys the world he seeks to save in fighting what he considers the battle of the Lord, he expels rabbis from their offices, brings the rich to beggary, and foments discord within and among congregations. Addressing some followers who ask for his blessing, he exclaims: “Farewell, your words are in vain; with fear you came, in fear go your way. … Virtuous must all be! ‘I chasten the world—like silver—with fire!’ says the Lord. ‘Winds have I sent to gather all her ends—and cast out all sin. … And sinners, like thorns, must be plucked!’” His reign of repression disturbs the very foundations of religion; his blind fanaticism drives many youths away from the fold.

Reb Pinkhos bent those nearest to him to his fanatic will. Reb Moshe, his son and successor, is especially victimized. Naturally of a mild mien, he grows up a timid and weakwilled man. His grandfather he had adored; his father he feared. Well-intentioned, eager to follow in the path of the noble Shlome, he has been too cowed by his father to assert himself—thus representing the generation whose offspring initiated the crusade for enlightenment. When he inherits his office he tries his utmost to be worthy of his trust, but the task is tremendous, the time very trying, and he lacks confidence in his own powers. “They took a feeble man,” he confesses, “and placed in his hands the key to profits, rain and snow—I can't bear it. They took a feeble man: ‘Conduct a world, talk to the world. …’” He does his best—and has a vision:

An eagle am I: broad, white, strong wings have I … and about me are the “young.” And I lead them into blue space, up, up, higher and higher! I spread my wings over my eaglets. Now and then I look about me to see that none falls, that none tarries, and I strengthen the weak with a glance, and lift the falling with a call. And we fly … far, far over the earth, over the world; and I call and my voice echoes across the seas, over mountains and meadows, over fields and forests, towns and cities … the voice echoes, the voice of the leader, of the true giant. … Suddenly—“Swindler!” I hear myself called. … Who knows? Perhaps it is Leah, perhaps something in my own heart. …

Leah, his daughter, speaks out rebelliously, representing the generation that broke the gyves with which Reb Pinkhos sought to shackle them. Unlike the others in the household, she refuses to be intimidated by her grandfather's strictures. Her love for Doctor Bergman—the giver of light—amplifies her strength; from him she learns the significance of science When her mother tells her that all must yield to Reb Pinkhos's will, Leah exclaims: “Not all! People without will … wrapped in shadow, enveloped in mist, stark with pain and fear. …” She also tells her ailing mother: “You shall not be a sacrifice on their altar! You shall not die without succor as he did. …”—“he” referring to Reb Shlome, who had died for want of medical aid. In the ensuing conflict she forsakes her parents to go with Bergman.

Years pass. The union of Leah with Bergman brings forth a child born blind: with eyes open but without sight. Humbly Leah comes to her mild father for help, hoping that what medical science cannot accomplish, a miracle may. She confesses that the light which had attracted her is cold. “Snow is clear—and snow is cold, snow is death!” She has given up science as a rope that choked and returned to God. “There can be no chaos. If there is a world, then there must be one who governs the world—there must be an eye that oversees us; a heart beats in us—the world must therefore have a heart. …” She begs her father and her brother to pray for her and her child.

Reb Moshe, the kind soul and devoted father, does so in a most sacred manner, invoking the long line of rabbinic ancestors to his aid. His effort is in vain. He has tempted God, and God will not be tempted. Having proved to be too frail a link in the golden chain, his son Jonathan succeeds him as rabbi.

Jonathan possesses some of the characteristics of both Shlome and Pinkhos, and he sees in Bergman a messenger of Satan. “A magician is he! … He denies Heaven—there are only stars, kind of planets … and no miracles—and no prayer helps—only law.” He warns his sister of his own vision:

I was in Heaven. … Lightsome sweet doves flew round and round me, touching my clothes, my cheeks as they flew, and they caressed and kissed my neck … and they flew before me and looked into my eyes and murmured into my ears: “Believe … believe … believe. …” I hear footsteps, two appear … he and she … he—a man of stone with the sheen of razors in his eyes; she—with knife in hand. … (To Leah, very much agitated) “How comes the knife to you?” He tells you, ‘cut,’ and you obey! You circle the knife about, it lightens—a fiery wheel. … And the doves, those that come upon the knife, fall … fall stabbed. … They die bleeding, and bleeding they murmur: “Believe … believe … believe. …”

In the final scene Jonathan, fervid in his faith and endowed with Shlome's imaginative vision, attempts to forge the golden chain anew.

Jonathan and Leah symbolize the two chief factions of Peretz's generation: one accepting the ancestral faith, obviously impaired, with anxious resolve; the other discarding it impulsively but uneasily for the rationalism of science. To Peretz the living truth was composed of both science and spirit, and of the two spirit was the more vital, for the spirit in man will not be denied. The laws of science have little power to succor man in emotional crisis, yet for modern man to ignore science could lead only to spiritual vacuity. These self-evident truths he stressed with poetic vigor and imaginative insight.

In The Golden Chain he presents with crystal clarity the essential nature of Hasidism: its ecstasy, idealism, fanaticism decadence, and belated poetic revival. The action is expressed in exquisite poetry. With Goethian grandeur he creates a realm with a phrase and probes the human spirit with a word. With symbolic subtlety and artistic intuitiveness he delves into the depths of Judaism. And in the process the main characters perch lifesize on the fiery wings of dramatic creation.

Peretz was not so much a writer who happened to have been born a Jew as a Jew with the ability and urge to depict Jewish life profoundly and artistically. “To be Jewish,” he declared, “is our only way to be human. … To find the essence of Jewishness in all places, all times, in all parts of the scattered and dispersed world-folk; to find the soul of all this and to see it lit with the prophetic dream of a human future—that is the task of the Jewish artist.” Fully aware of the circumstances in which his people found themselves, of their particular qualities and failings, and of their spiritual status, he could not but assume the role of provocative polemicist and direct them toward social and religious insurgence. This part of his writing is always ethical, though not as obtrusively as Mendele's.

In his literary work he was a great experimenter. In prose and verse he essayed every form, rhythm, and style suited to his purpose. He was indeed more the inspired artist than any of his contemporaries—always writing with high seriousness; realizing from the first that he was one of the founders of a new literature, and in large part responsible for its character and growth. He therefore deliberately sowed the seeds of literary art. Endowed with the gift of versatility, he wrote in various genres. His innate delight in experimentation was stimulated by the new literary currents then prevailing among Western writers. He wrote in turn as a naturalist, a realist, a romanticist, a symbolist, and an impressionist, in each form creating an artistic pattern for younger Yiddish writers. He never lost his youthful suppleness, and continued to experiment and to encourage new writers to the end of his life.

Yet he did not create a literary school and left no direct descendants. Pinski, Yehoash, Reisen, Nomberg, Asch, Hirschbein, and many others were privileged to be his friends and pupils, but none attempted to emulate him. In his enormous correspondence with literary neophytes—carried on with Dinesohn's invaluable stimulation and aid—he set them a high standard and goaded them to greater efforts by means of criticism, admonition, and approval. An enemy of verbosity, he often urged them to compress sentences into words and paragraphs into two sentences; to be extremely careful of their diction, choosing the one correct word out of the ten that come to mind; to write about things they knew best and express themselves simply and beautifully. Despite this activity, he founded no school chiefly because his style was inimitable. None writing in Yiddish, with the possible exception of Yehoash, Opatoshu, and Bergelson, could approach him in stylistic excellence.

Although an ethicist in his thinking, in the expression of his subject-matter he was the genuine esthete. Once a theme ripened in his mind, he concentrated not so much on its content as on its form. His insistence on the exact word, the most effective image and phrasing, exercised with Flaubertian painstaking, gave his style a laconic pithiness. His frequent dots, indicating ellipses, so characteristic of his writing, often convey more than explicit statements. Although he was fully conscious of his great talent, and sometimes gave the impression of being conceited, he could never bring himself to regard his writings as finished products. The Golden Chain, for instance, was rewritten five times, and other works were revised again and again. In consequence he often achieved verbal brilliance along with genuine spontaneity of expression. For his ear was as sensitized as a fine photographic plate, and he heard and remembered the essence of folk speech. In all his stories, particularly the Hasidic and folk tales, he gave artistic form to the living language of the Polish Jews.

Because Peretz's style is dynamic in character, his dots assume the significance of unuttered gestures: the shrugs and eye movements of a person speaking, so subtly charged with overtones by the preceding words that the reader's imagination supplies the suggested nuances of meaning with the pleasure of a collaborator. Like the work of all thoughtful writers, his also possesses a three-dimensional connotation: his intent, while intelligible to the simple reader on a superficial level, sometimes eludes complete comprehension by even the sophisticated critic.

The dynamism of his style gives the breath of life to his characters. “For Peretz,” A. A. Roback stated, “a character is always in movement. It keeps becoming a personality.” Be they rabbi or lout, leading citizen or outcast, worker or idler, rich or poor—all are depicted with insight and sympathy. Even in that part of his work in which he is as much the reformer as the artist he rarely permitted the moral to obscure the motivation. In the wide range of his characters we come to know intuitively the spiritual idealism of the Jews of his generation as well as their material woes and individual faults and frailties. Coming from the crowded and confining ghettos, they appear to us as human beings groveling for bread and yet aspiring to God, seeking the truths of science while clinging to the truths whose surface has become tarnished, but whose spiritual soundness is everlasting.