BOYS AND BOOKS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 79, 15 November 1911, Page 4

BOYS AND BOOKS.

A correspondent of a leading Homo journal writes:—l know of a boy, twelve years old, of Russian parentage, born and bred in North London, who is a lover of Dickens, but prefers to read him in Russian, though English is of course equally his native language. 1 thought this sufficiently surprising, though 1 knew that Dickens was a popular favourite in Russia. But I confess that 1 was altogether overcome when I read in the ‘Zionist,’ tiie most brilliant and intellectual nationalist organ published in English, that the first of a scries of Hebrew books for the young is a translation of Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” under the title of “Meorarath Tom.” My Anglo-Russian boy’s affection for Sam Weller’s moujik witticisms was, in my opinion, the most wonderful tribue J ever know to the universality of an English writer’s genius. But that tiie Hebrew translators should have made “Torn Sawyer,” the impersonation of all our boyish romanticism and superstition, their first choice simply staggers the imagination; for it implies that the Jewish lad not merely in England and the United States but throughout Europe and the Near East, and even further, is essentially one with the rapscallion hero of Mark Twain. “Meorarath Tom” is a tribute not merely to the universal genius of Mark Twain, but to tiro'universality and oneness of boyhood everywhere, from the banks of the Mississippi to those, of the Euphrates. A strange variety ofi garb and feature must clothe an identical spirit of larking and make-believe.