SOURCE: "Soviet Yiddish Literature," in his A History of Yiddish Literature, Jonathan David Publishers, 1972, pp. 194-236

Liptzin is an accomplished Russian-born American editor, translator, critic, and noted scholar of German and Yiddish literature. In the following excerpt, he offers a survey ofDer Nister's career, focusing particularly on The Family Mashber.

The Yiddish-Hebrew pseudonym, Der Nister, which may be translated as the Hidden One or the Occult Person, is an apt characterization of the outstanding representative of Neo-romanticism among the Yiddish writers of the Ukraine.

Der Nister began in 1907 with prose poems, dream images, in which Jewish, Christian and Olympian supernatural creatures were intermingled. He continued in 1912 and 1918 with songs, odes, versified prayers, allegories of God and Satan, mystic visions that spanned heaven and earth and dissolved in nebulous melancholy, ballads which were meant to delight children but which also hinted at meanings beyond their grasp. Thus, the tree...