A Jewish Decameron

• YisriSel : The First Jewish Omnibus. Edited by Joseph Leftwich. (John Heritage. 10s. 6d.) .

ONE meets all sorts of people in an omnibus, and therenre all sorts of stories' in this book—the fantastic, the everyday, the 'grotesque, the plain,' the mild and the terrible. Mr. Leftwich wonders whether they have any common national quality whethei, from reading them, one could detect .their-Jewish origin. Many of them, of course, bear the clear iznpressof the race ; they show the sort of knowledge which is possible only

to members of the community. But in a great many of the authors the Jewish blood is diluted : indeed, we never knew

before how many Jews there are in the world. - Perhaps after all we are the Lost Ten Tribes.; and we have long suspected that a little genealogical research would prove that Hitler is a descendant of Jeroboam the son of Nebat. Be this as it may, and whether some of these writers are actually Jews, or are included because they had Jewish grandmothers, the book is

a tribute to the genius of the race. They may have lived long among Gentiles, and may, like their fathers of old, have

spoiled the Egyptians 'with whom they have sojourned for a few centuries. But they have certainly, in many cases, repaid -the debt ; and the peoples who have harboured them have certainly had no intellectual reason to repent their hospitality.

The best stories, of course, are not here, and on good grounds. Mr. Leftwich hits • felt no obligation to reprint the

tale of Joseph, the idyll of Ruth, the " Midrash " of Jonah, or the Parables of the greatest of all Jews : these, the ne pl: s ultra of narrative power, are accessible to all. He refers also to the rich store of Talmudic folk-tale, but he gives us a mere glimpse and passes on. -Nor does he reprint any of the admir- able fables given by Israel Abrahams in the Book of Delight.

Fortunately, he says, he has plenty of unused material— perhaps we shall have some of this in. a later: volume.

In a Decameron like this, with its hundred ' stories, it is

plainly, impossible to aim at an order of merit, or to appraise a tithe of them. _ Some, to the present writer, are unattractive or even repulsive; some appear pointless : but the majority attain a remarkably high level, and that though it is not by any means the invariable habit of authors to.hand over their best things to the . anthologist. Still, out of these five- score tales, there are perhaps fifty which will appeal to all tastes, and possibly not ten which,will fail to appeal to some It may be a, sign of approaching. senility, .but those. which seem to us the best are either oktfavourites themselves, or the work of authors who are favourites....Thus,. Rion in Heaven; which appropriately opens the volume, we re-read with the enjoyment which we had_ when we read it first many years

ago. - The, same may be said of Heine's Seder .Night from the Rabbi of Bacharach. We turned with. special expectation to Amy Levy's Cohen of Trinity: for.the genius of thisAmhappy girl has .always seemed to us to have promised great things. Reuben Sachs is an unsurpassed 'novel of Jewish-life. The interest of.Cohen ,of .Trinity lies largely in its autobiographical and prophetic_ character ; it forebodes her own death and

hints at her own Cambridge life, that life of which she wrote :

, ," The sad rain fells from Heaven-,--

MYheart ie great with woe- - " I have neither a friend nor 'honour,

- Yet Lam sorry to go."- . • - - Berthold Auerbach, whose Spinoza, ein Denkerleben is a German and almost an English classic, is represented here by a pleasant little story' entitled liansjorg and his Pipe,. . Among the living writers it is invidious to make a choice. Many are well-known English or American novelists : these' will receive attention because of their repute: The- Hebrew and Yiddish stories, on the other hand; will be read because of their strangeness. But, it is not invidious to select the Editor, whose preface is in- every way- admirable, and whose

diligence; shown not " only in picking out the stories but in personally translating several of - them, is worthy . of high praise. The biographical notes, also, are informative and must have cost much trouble." We have only one thing

against them—they are too laudatory. - Every author is the greatest, the best, the supreme.-This is -the more reinaikable as, if' we are rightly informed, Hebrew •has no' superlative degree—a fact which goes far to explain the great- position: which-the Hebrew race has-taken in-the history of the world.

R. E. KELLETri