THE WORLD OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM

To the who is trained in his own folklore and literature, the name of Sholom Aleichem carries great significance. To the rest of us, in all probability, it is an unknown quantity. In this volume, Maurice Samuel has attempted to recapture that internal world of Russian Jewry, of two and three generations ago, and to convey the spirit of the people who inhabited it, as their interpreter saw them, and to recapture the little intimate things he wrote about that gave that world its entity. He gives as , the and Menachem Mendel, the schlimihl; he pictures the tiny town, Krasulevky, its market place, its cemetery, the marriage customs, the Sabbaths and festivals, the characteristics of the people, and the changing mood as new displaced old during the lifetime of the one spokesman. A book for a sharply defined market.