One would like to know a little more about the
provenance of Mr. Harry E. Burroughs' Tale of a Vanished Land (Allen, I5s.). It seems in large part autobiographical, and describes the life of a Jewish community, of whom the author despite his name was one, in an obscure Russian village before the War. It would help one's belief in the credibility of the story if one knew how old was the narrator at the time of the incidents narrated, as for instance, when a candidate for a village office promises the electors that, should he be elected, no illegitimate children should be born during his regime. We find a difficulty in accepting this as part of the remini- scences of a child, but a few pages previously the author has put his age at five. This precocious five-year-old discovered, by listening on consecutive nights to the involuntary eon. fession of a sleep-talker and suspected thief, the missing gold-- in a " crock " ; and at an even earlier age; when cholera attacked his native village, he grasped the feeling "of the helplessness of men and the patience of women, in short, of chance and human dignity." An impressionable infant plainly, but the book does give a conspectus of the super- stitions, the ways of life (including the dirt), the simplicity, the patient submission, and withal, the stubborn racial pride which throughout the ages has preserved the soul of the Jew.
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