Review of Haim Schwarzbaum, Studies in Jewish and World Folklore

This is a book of comparative notes and studies for the texts which are published in a volume of Yiddish oral-narratives edited by Naftoli Gross, Maaselech un Mesholim: Tales and Parables (New York, 1955). Gross, a Yiddish poet and writer had had a lifelong interest in folktales. As he writes in the preface to his book, he himself comes from a traditional home in which both parents, a grandfather, and many neighbors frequently told stories. The end of the Sabbath day was the favorite storytelling time. He learned other traditional tales and anecdotes from his peers and mates in the traditional Jewish school which he attended. At a relatively early age Gross began to record tales from oral tradition in his home town, Kolomyya, and continued to do so during his travels in Galicia. Immediately after the First World War he began publishing these tales in the children's magazine Kundas and in east European Yiddish newspapers. Some of the texts in this volume come from that period. However, the majority of the tales first appeared in a daily column which Gross edited for the Yiddish daily in America, the Jewish Daily Forward.