ABSTRACT

In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, a collection of fifty-eight short stories appeared in New York. As early as 1907 Joseph Opatoshu immigrated and settled in New York, where he became famous for his novels whose plots were set either in Poland or in the United States. Written between 1934 and 1938, some of the short stories were first published in the Yiddish New York daily paper Der Tog (Day), to which Opatoshu contributed for forty years as soon as it appeared in 1914. The first story, set in New York on Lafayette Street during the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1929, is not the only one on poverty, starvation, and being outcast, but it depicts precisely what it means to be homeless and on the street. The importance of books in Jewish culture throughout the centuries is mentioned in several stories, in a playful, serious, or tragic manner.