ABSTRACT
Yehiel Yeshaya Trunk was born into a wealthy Hasidic family in the village of Osmólsk Górny near Lowicz in Poland. In his earliest years, Trunk was especially interested in the relationship between art and realism, and he published extensively on this subject. His early work, all published in Poland, included historical and critical essays on Sholem Aleykhem, Y. L. Peretz, Knut Hamsun and Oscar Wilde, on whose novel The Picture of Dorian Grey he published a perceptive analysis. Trunk's reworking of the Jewish pope myth is in part a dramatization and a defence of Dubnov's views. Other varieties of Diaspora experience, where different conditions may have produced different attitudes in Jews, are of no interest to the narrator of this tale; in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Trunk, the tale's author, sees the lot of Jews throughout the world as eternally the same.
