Page:Nine Yiddish Writers.djvu/27

  literary genius embodies the age in which he is born. He absorbs it and expresses it. He is to his society what the sun is to the earth, shedding its rays and bestowing its warmth upon all, giving light to the stone, and color to the flower, stirring the cock to crow and the lark to sing, laying bare the poisonous marsh in all its hideousness, and the rippling stream in all its splendor.

And the true literary genius is as rare as the suns are in heaven. Planets and stars, constellations of all kinds, bigger and smaller, may fill the skies in numbers uncountable; but the great sun, the source of all light is always one; and sometimes long, long nights pass before it looms up on the horizon and climbs into the center of heaven in the full display of its glory.

The first genius in Yiddish literature was Isaac Leibush Perez. He was born in a little town in Russian Poland, in the year 1851, when Jewish hopes