When Yiddish secular textbooks began to appear at the beginning of the twentieth century, their authors soon realized that there was a lack of suitable children's literature to include in such textbooks. Shmuel Niger, the leading ideologist of the Yiddishist movement, stressed that the 'task of creating a children's literature in our language is seen ever more as an important national and communal goal that we must hasten to make a reality'. Children's magazines played a key role in the development of Yiddish children's literature, especially in its heyday during the interwar period: they were an inexpensive medium for providing children with appropriate reading material. The twenty textbooks for schools containing stories by Joseph Opatoshu were published between 1919 and 1958, eleven of them in New York. The New York publications were brought out by important educational institutions, in particular the socialist Workmen's Circle and the communist International Workers' Order.