Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/584

 236 Journal of A merican Folk-Lore.

personality of the pious mystic, whom his adorers revere as a seer and miracle-worker, foreseen by prophets and encircled by a nimbus of fire.

An interesting chapter is given to the folk-song. Polish Jews are essen- tially an urban population ; their songs have little to do with nature, and, from the position of the Jew in his adopted country, possess no patriotic tinge. The oppression and gloom of the intellectual atmosphere gives to song a pessimistic character ; the passion of love has been so completely suppressed by the preference for didactic composition, and the custom of youthful marriages, that the word does not exist in the Yiddish vocabulary, and was borrowed from the German only about the middle of the century. The tribulations of the orphan and the widow, the terror of enforced mili- tary service, satire of the fanatical Khassidim, form common themes of the folk-song. In the case of Morris Rosenfeld, a poet of the first capacity has been wearing out his life in the sweat-shops of New York, of whose horrors he has furnished dreadful pictures.

The rapidity of development of this short-lived literature is illustrated by the history of the wedding jester or badchen. In mediseval time the function of this personage was to amuse the guests at the wedding, while the serious discourses were delivered by the rabbi and the bridegroom. In Russia he had come to usurp these functions ; but in the fifties it occurred to Zunser, then only in his teens, to make the badchen a singer of songs. Zunser had talent as a composer, and his words and tunes imme- diately became popular in Russia, Galicia, and Roumania ; in a short time the former jester became a minstrel, who, if he could, produced original compositions of his own. The song-writer who had such an effect on the customs of his people now is a printer in New York.

It is impossible here to follow Professor Wiener through his sketch of the rapid evolution of Yiddish literature in its swiftly changing periods. A complete bibliography would be enormous, the authors of the present cen- tury numbering at least four or five thousand ; but as the works have been thrown out with no care for preservation, and disappear with wonderful rapidity, completeness in this task is impossible, nor would the undertak- ing have interest except for its scientific side. In America, this literature is in rapid decay, the solvent of American institutions speedily absorbing independent Jewish folk-life, and the theatre, especially, having sunk to the lowest level. The patience and learning of Professor Wiener has fur- nished, in the form of notes, an abundance of references for the use of any one who may desire to make a study of the subject.

The latter part of the book is devoted to a chrestomathy, from which the reader may form some idea of the speech and the compositions for which it has furnished a medium.

W. W. Newell.

Peasant Lore from Gaelic Ireland. Collected by Daniel Deeney. London : D. Nutt. 1900. Pp. vii, 80.

This little book contains a curious gathering of Irish superstitions, and, like every gleaning from that inexhaustible source, serves to cast new light

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