Yiddish Short Stories Edited by Isaac Goldberg
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| Yiddish Short Stories Edited by Isaac Goldberg |
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 accupy 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, not 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 methcd is purged of all cryptic
