Maurice Samuel presents to the English-reading audience one of the richest spirits of the Yiddish language to appear at the beginning of the twentieth century. Through the writings of Isaac Loeb Peretz, he provides access to the lost and lamented world of Polish Jewry. Peretz's folk and Chassidic tales are here retold. The author has arranged them into a pattern that reveals both the life and work of the great writer as well as the basic folklore of the Jews of Poland. Originally published by Knopf in 1948, this edition includes a new introduction by Jacob Neusner.

"At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world's Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders. This led the historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish 'Dark Continent.' Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary and aspiring ethnographer named An-sky pledged to explore the Pale. He dreamed of leading an ethnographic expedition that would produce an archive--what he called an Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite--which would preserve Jewish traditions and transform them into the seeds of a modern Jewish culture. Between 1912 and 1914, An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took thousands of photographs, and created a massive ethnographic questionnaire. Consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish--exploring the gamut of Jewish folk beliefs and traditions, from everyday activities to spiritual exercises to marital intimacies--the Jewish Ethnographic Program constitutes an invaluable portrait of Eastern European Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Nathaniel Deutsch offers the first complete translation of the questionnaire, as well as the riveting story of An-sky's almost messianic efforts to create a Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change. An-sky's project was halted by World War I, and within a few years the Pale of Settlement would no longer exist. These survey questions revive and reveal shtetl life in all its wonder and complexity." -- Publisher's Web site.

Brancusi's Romanian heritage is an important subject for those who study the sculptor. He was 28 years old in 1904 when he arrived in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. He considered himself Romanian, he dressed like a Romanian peasant, and lived like one. (He was in fact a sophisticated intellectual.) When he arrived in Paris, the avant-garde was searching for original sources of inspiration. For many, African art filled that role. Brancusi found African art a trigger which released the reminiscences of his Romanian folk tradition. Brancusi used his heritage for formal and iconographical inspiration; however, his working method was inspired by the French avant-garde. Edith Balas shows that the pedestals and homemade furniture were for the artist as important an artistic product as his sculptures; he exchanged them occasionally. There are several new iconographical interpretations of sculptures previously not linked with the Romanian folklore.