I have pointed out the sad conditions of the past only in order to contrast them with the promising conditions of the present. We have a right to be filled with hope for the future when we see what Zionism has accomplished in such a short time. If Frankl were to rise from his eternal rest and come to Jerusalem to-day, he would be more astonished than Rip Van Winkle. How great would be his bewilderment at the miraculous change of the state of things. The school which he founded with four pupils has now hundreds of students eager to learn and to know. And instead of one single school he would find many in Jerusalem and Jaffa. In his time Frankl only met with one farmer in Jerusalem, Don Perez, and how great to-day is the number of colonists in Palestine, and how beautiful are those colonies, and what blest and happy lives do those colonists lead; a life which combines Chochmah, Torah and Abodah, such as was the ideal of our Talmudic sages when
each Rabbi earned his living through his manual work. And what would Frankl say of the beautiful Bezalel school, he who thought the Jew of Jerusalem unfit to work? What a different, what a transformed Palestine Frankl would see to-day! And what a beautiful picture, he, with his powerful language and artistic soul, would have made of the present Palestine? It would have no longer been to him the land of holy graves, but that of living souls; the land not of our fathers, only, but also that of our fathers’ grandchildren, not the land of misery and alms, but the land of milk and honey, the land, as the poet says, whose air animates the soul and is a balm to the body. Now, when we visit Jerusalem, we no longer have to manifest signs of distress, and of mourning; we no longer have to cut crie. at the death of the holy city, but we can rejoice at its miraculous rebuilding, and bless God that we have reached such a time.
THE YIDDISH TALES
A GREAT preserving force in a nation is the Artist. He sheds his powerful searchlight upon things and gives them form and progress. He laughs at the unsocial, mimics the unprogressive and glorifies the Ideal. He gives limitless praise to the hero, the man of great activity, the accomplisher of great deeds.
The Jewish race has its artists, its story tellers. They know the Jewish heart and can unmask it from the most baffling commonplace. They have drawn for us the Jew of the Ghetto, the great sufferer, until his image is seared eternally in our hearts. The language in which these artists wove their thoughts may not be everlasting. Time requires of nothing to be everlasting. But its literature will always be one of the great means by which the Jewish race will preserve its great individuality.
In this connection, we welcome heartily the recent change of policy in the publi-
cations of the "Jewish Publication Society," as manifested in the output of such books as "The Renaissance of Hebrew Literature," and "The Selected Essays of Achad Ha'am." The change is very proper; for, while it is admittedly true that the branch of Jewish literature commonly denominated as pure literature, written by Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, in their own native languages, were of great importance to us in the early part of the nineteenth century, it is very evident that their place of importance must be usurped by that branch of real literature hitherto passed by with indifference or contempt, those writings in Yiddish and Hebrew, the essence of whose genius is the will and energy which has kept Judaism alive throughout the Diaspora.
The recent publication of "The Yiddish Tales," a collection of short stories called from the numerous works of the many popular Yiddish writ-