Isaac Leib Peretz

"A stranger's rose is but a thorn."

"Who tells the truth needs no fancy phrases."

"Time is change, transformation, evolution. Time is eternal sprouting, blossoming, the eternal tomorrow."

"Nobody ever stubs his toe against a mountain. It's the little temptations that bring a man down."

"The voice is on the borderline between the physical and the spiritual."

"Man has been likened to an earthen pot.... You have but to tap the pot with your finger. If it rings back full and true, all is well; there is your perfect pot. And if not—man, alas, has been likened to a broken potsherd."

"In this world it is very dangerous to be weak."

"If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool."

"I am a rainworm, buried deep Among the oozing, slimy things, Yet of an eagle's nest I dream, And eagle's wings."

"Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears."

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike. The founding father of this literature, Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, championed the liberation of Jewish women in his stories, poems, and plays, as did his protégés Sholem Asch, Avrom Reisen, and Yoysef Opatoshu, among others."

"Everyone knows, for example, about Yitskhok Leyb Peretz’s house in Warsaw, frequently visited by authors. He acted as a father to them. How many Yiddish writers would indeed never have become Yiddish writers if not for the help and encouragement of Yitskhok Leyb Peretz!"

"From Sholem Aleichem to Peretz and beyond, canonical Yiddish literature does not mince words when it comes to identifying the tormentors of Jews as Christians."

"Modern Yiddish literature attained its maturity with the work of three classical masters: Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. These three authors were the literary forebears whom subsequent generations of Yiddish writers both emulated and rebelled against."

"Throughout all of Yiddish literature, beginning with the classical writers...there is an undercurrent of sympathy for the Jewish woman, as well as guilt about her double enslavement, both as woman and as Jew...Itzkhok Leybush Peretz was most aware of the Jewish woman's double bind and depicted it without embellishment. I would say that he was the first thoroughgoing feminist in the literature, as can be seen in his two strongest stories from Folkstimlekhe Geshikhtn (Folkloric Tales)."

"the triumvirate of Yiddish masters, S. Y. Abramovitch, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz"