one of the mob fired a shot into the side of the tortured man, and the pallor of dissolution came into the upturned, suffering face, the old man trembled.
"Sh'ma Yisroel!" he murmured. "Avrom ben Zakai! I taught him his Mishna and
Gemorrah. He has redeemed himself. Who will redeem us?—Let us say B'rachamim."
And together, while the mad young mother back in the room crouched along the wall and suckled her babe, they prayed B'rachamim, the mercy prayer for the dying.
A LITERARY MEDIOCRITY*
During the earlier half of the nineteenth century the romantic school held absolute sway over literary Europe. It was a school which made but little effort to study the facts, but proceeded to delineate human character and to portray life based on no better and reliable information and intimate knowledge of the subject matter treated of than their own fertile imagination and inaccurate, hazy, and superficial knowledge. The philosophy of the human heart, so to speak, just like the philosophy of history, was as yet quite unknown and an almost unexplored wilderness, therefore the heroes of the romancer and worker of that early day were made to behave not as they would, as rational human beings, act in such emergency, but as they should act in accordance with the preconceived notions of the romancer of that day. In those days, and at the hands of the then literary masters, a hero was either encircled by a halo of sanctity or was possessed of the horns and the cloven feet of his satanic majesty. He had to be either totally good and possessed of all the virtues to a superlative degree or a devil incarnate without a vestige of a conscience, neither scrupling nor hesitating at the most revolting crimes and glorying in his moral obsessions.
These animadversions quite involuntarily occur to the average person upon reading the collection of short stories of Judeo-German life under the title of "Stories of Jewish Home Life," translated from the German and recently issued by the Jewish Publication Society, wherein the author attempts, in a
*STORIES of JEWISH HOME LIFE, by S. D. Mosenthal. Translated from the German. The Jewish Publication Soc., Phila., 1907.
series of five moderately long sketches, to create as many saints, as many supernaturally good and superlatively virtuous people, and these same people are taken from the lower strata of society, of inferior intelligence, who plod along obscurely in the humbler walks of life, people who are ever ready to sacrifice —and this without at all being conscious that they are doing anything out of the ordinary or experiencing the rudiments of a struggle within themselves—their own comfort and even their very existence. Thus we are moved quite involuntarily to shake our head in utter incredibility while the smile of the sceptic hovers about our lips, and pronounce the rather cruel judgment that such noble creatures have never had a more material existence than that afforded them by the resourceful brain of a romantic author.
The human race, and the Jewish race in particnlar, can boast of the possession of some. very noble men and women and from the. many päges of history we can cull, here and there, a noble flower of manhood and womanhood, but truly great and gifted people are born at but rare and long intervals when the age is especially fitted, by any single or a multiplicity of causes and circumstances, to. produce such exemplars of the desired superman and who are merely the exception which rather tends to confirm the rule of the average mediocrity of the race. To be brief, our author has 'enveloped his many heroes—especially heroines—in such a glamor of sunshine and glory, that we can say without any hesitancy, that if he wished: to sing the praises of the plain, old-fashioned Jewess, he has by his own exaggeration defeated his own ends of impressing his reader with the virtues of a people that no doubt is possessed of‘