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Hebrew Studies 43 (2002) 331 Reviews perbly insightful, rivetingly so especially in its analysis of the stories and persona of Sholem Aleichem, Miron's essays nevertheless attend in consider able detail to the perspectives of critics against whom he positions his own views and with whom he insistently disagrees—even if like Sh. Niger, they put forth their opinions in 1912 or, like M. Viner, in 1928. In that sense, one can't help but wish that the essays in the book, most of which address power ful questions of the Yiddish canon despite having been published a quarter of a century ago, had been revised for this collection. That said, however, several essays in this collection are particularly out standing, and three, at least, should be considered classics: "The Literary Im age of the Shtetl," "Sholem Aleichem: Person, Persona, Presence," and "Journey to the Twilight Zone: On Sholem Aleichem's Railroad Stories." Though one can question whether hitching the argument to a distinction be tween the metonymic and metaphorical and to the "megametaphorical" is as necessary as Miron suggests, the core insight of the first—that the shtetl "represents a tiny exiled Jerusalem, a Yerushlayim shel mata...\ow, down trodden Jerusalem in exile as opposed to the lofty, royal, independent capital graced by the presence of God in His Temple" (p. 33) unfolds with a power ful inevitability, as do the points that follow, until one wonders how one could ever have mistaken "Kasrilevke.. .a bright jewel in our literary crown" as a veiled "Voronke." Just as Miron vividly distinguishes between the historical and the mythical shtetls, so he also identifies the vital differences between the multilingual, troubled writer named Sholem Rabinovitsh and the fictional personality and eternally "unexpected guest" (p. 151), Sholem Aleichem, with his "trade marks" of "freedom, equanimity, and good spirits" (p. 145). Locating the distinction between the man and his pen-name in its tragic historical moment, the "hell of existence in general and of Jewish existence in particular," Miron demonstrates in detail how the pseudonym is used to indicate, by its very ex istence, "a possible road to freedom, the only road to it: the transforming path of art, the transcending trip of the comic spirit" (p. 156). Particularly af ter reading The Image of the Shtetl, one can be only grateful that the new translation by Hillel Halkin of Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, for the Library of Yiddish Classics, has captured what earlier translations into English sought to eradicate: the sense of foreignness, of cultural transplanta tion, of the resonant, even haunting, "linguistic layers" wrought by the inimi table Tevye's quoting from the Hebrew. Miriyam Glazer University ofJudaism Los Angeles, CA 90077 mglazer@uj.edit ...

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