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SHOLOM \ALEICHEM AND HIS PEOPLE
THE
Ow
CouNTRY.
By
Shalom Aleichem. Crown Publishers.
$3.
F
EW WRITERS have so completely captured the imagination of their
,
people as has Sholom Aleichem that of the Jews. He is the property
of the J ewish people as a whole, rather than a writer whom nationalistic
intellectuals would like to elevate to a folk-hero. Even those J ews who
border on illiteracy and read nothing but a few headlines in the Yiddish
press are aware of him as a force in their tradition, a spokesman for
their way.
Here surely is a problem to intrigue the contemporary writer who
feels his sense of separation from the folk as one of his heaviest burdens.
No writer in America has ever enjoyed the status that Sholom Aleichem
does with the Jews. Mark Twain almost did and for a time became part
of the national myth; but America's cultural heterogeneity was to make
impossible the acceptance of any single writer as the folk-voice.
The J ewish experience of the past few centuries was centered in
the Ghetto. Whether that Ghetto was bounded by walls of stone mat–
tered little in the end, for there were walls nonetheless which made the
...
~
~
The advent of a brilliant novelist
All Thy
Conquests
BY ALFRED HAYES
The first important novel to come out of the war that
deals with the moral destruction of a nation, Mr. Hayes'
remarkable story portrays a people caught in the agony
of conquest, political chaos and starvation. Its back–
ground is Rome under the occupation - a Rome
Baedeker never knew.
$2.75
HOWELL, SOSKIN, PUBLISHERS, INC.
~
~
17 EAST 45th STREET, NEW YORK 17
~
~~
