YIDDISH FOLKTALES
Beatrice Weinreich
Hardcover
(Pantheon, March 15, 1721)
This volume presents a selection from the wealth of Yiddish folk-tales and legends told in the Yiddish-speaking world of Eastern Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of their tales in present versions have never been printed before in any language and most of them appear here in English for the first time. Together they offer us a privileged entry into a vibrant and vital community. The Jews of Eastern Europe some 7 million people by the 1937's, lived throughout a vast territory, from Poland in the west to Russia in the east, from Latvia in the north to Rumania in the south.from villages of few to hundreds of thousands in the cities. united by their mother tongue Yiddish, A ramic, and Hebrew. The tales in this volume are drawn largely from efforts of folklorists and amateur collectors who wrote down thousands of legends, fables, jokes, and stories, these stories embody a far older heritage of Jewish narrative art. A tale recorded in 1926 in Poland is a variant of a book published in 1707 in Yiddish found in an even earlier version in 1521.Other tales were traced back to Babylonia and Judea by sages of the Talmud, some fifteen hundred years ago.