MARK TWAIN IN HEBREW.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1295, 25 November 1911, Page 11

MARK TWAIN IN HEBREW.

I know (writes a correspondent in an English paper) of a boy, twelve years old, of Russian parentage, born and bred in North London, who is a lover of Dickens but prefers to read him in Russian, though English is of course equally his native language. 1 thought this sufficiently surprising, though 1 knew that Dickens was a popular favourite iu Russia. But I confess that I was altogether overcome when I read in the "Zionist," the most brilliant nationalist organ published in English, that the first of a series of Hebrew books for tlio young i≤ a translation of Hark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," under the title of "Meorarath Tom/' My Anglo-Russian boy's affection for Sam Weller's moujik witticisms was, in my oDinion, the most wonderful tribute I ever knew to the universality of an 'English writer's genius. But that tho Hebrew translators should have made- "Tom Sawyer," the impersonation of all our boyish romanticism and superstition, their first choice simply staggers the imagination; for it implies that the Jewish lad not merely in England and the United States, but throughout Europe and the Near East, and oven further, is essentially one with the mpscallion hero qI Mark Twain. "Meorarath Tom" is a tribute not merely to the'universal genius of Mark Twain, but to the universality and oneness of bovhood everywhere, from the banks of the Mississippi to those of the iCuphrates. A etrango variety of garb and feature must clolhe. an identical spirit of larking and make-believe.