SOURCE: "Humanism, Yiddish-Style," in The New Republic, Vol. 204, No. 3, January 21, 1991, pp. 35-8.

In the following essay, Baranczak offers an appreciative review of The I. L. Peretz Reader.

For any American reader, [The I. L. Peretz Reader] will be a handy and skillfully edited selection of the most representative writings of one of the masters of world literature. For any Jewish American reader, it will also be a monument in commemoration of one of the central figures in modern Jewish culture, a writer who, along with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem, laid the foundations for the modern Yiddish literary tradition. For a Polish-American reader such as myself, this book is all those things, too; but it is also, inevitably, a book about Poland, and even more fascinating for being focused not exactly on Poland itself. On Jewish life in Poland? Obviously. But its other, ever present theme is...