"The Cross and Other Jewish Stories", translated from the Yiddish by different people, bolongs
to the series called the New Yiddish Library, from Yale University Press.
The seires include other authors like Sholem Aleichem, I.L.Peretz, S.Ansky and Itzik Manger.
This book is divided into three parts: "
Pogrom Tales", "The Old World" and "The New World". The reader will find both direct and lyrical narratives in each chapter, although the pogrom tales offer a high degree of graphic violence which is common in Yiddish literature.
Levi Joshua Shapiro, the author of this book, was born in 1878 in Rzhishcev, a little Ukrainian shtetl. When he was 18 years old left the yeshiva studies and moved to Warsaw in order to become a writer. In order to accomplish his dream he would spend time in such different places as New York, London, Zurich and Los Angeles where he died in 1948.