Idyls of the Gass. By Martha Wolfenstein. (Macmillan and Co.
6s.)—There is a great charm about these sketches of Jewish life,—a charm, however, which becomes sometimes too pathetic to be endurable. Miss Wolfenstein gives us almost too poignantly the feeling of helpless, hopeless oppression which hangs like a cloud over the Jewish quarter of a foreign town. The story of Maryam, the saintly old Jewish woman, and her irresistible little grandson Shimmele is charming reading, though the reader feels the end advancing with as inevitable a step as the fate of the doom in a Greek tragedy. So me people may be able to bear to read the last chapter; the present writer confesses to not being among their number. The accusation of ritual murder brought against the Jewish couple, and the subsequent riot on their acquittal, are made horrible by the knowledge that the book is fiction founded on fact. It has been said that every nation has the Jew it deserves, but if Maryam and Shimmele are portraits, it is obvious that some nations have Jews much better than they deserve.
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