SOURCE: "A Sociology of Mishpoche Stereotypes," in From Shtetl to Suburbia: The Family in Jewish Literary Imagination, Beacon Press, 1978, pp. 86-115.

In the following excerpt, Gittleman discusses Peretz's depiction of Jewish family life.

Peretz is inevitably linked to Mendele Mocher Sforim and to Sholom Aleichem to form the great troika of "classical" Yiddish literature. Chronologically and temperamentally, he belongs with them. He represents a different geographic and social audience, however. Peretz wrote primarily for Polish Jewry, and the historical events which produced this community of Jews were different from those which affected the Russian Jew. Poland had undergone a series of partitions during the eighteenth century, and many of her millions of Jews found themselves under Austrian rule. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Jewish population had relatively settled down, and with the creation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the reestablishment of the Polish state, Jews could...