SOURCE: "The Speaking Voice," in Sholom Aleichem, Twayne Publishers, 1977, pp. 95-124.

Frances Butwin is a Polish-born American translator and critic. With Julius Butwin, she selected and translated a collection of stories by Sholom Aleichem, which was published in 1946 as The Old Country. She has since translated several other volumes of Sholom Aleichem's works. Joseph Butwin is an American educator and critic who has published articles on English, French, and Yiddish literature. In the following essay from their biographical and critical study of Sholom Aleichem, the authors explore Aleichem's use of skaz—the spoken tale—and compare it to American examples from Mark Twain and Ring Lardner.

In his essay on Nikolai Leskov, Walter Benjamin describes the historical process that "has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing...