The author, an Israeli folklorist who teaches at the University of Haifa, has had the excellent idea of scrutinizing the various “legends of origin” of Polish Jewry. She makes use of works by Hebrew and Yiddish authors, published in modern times but based on folk material of considerable antiquity, and of materials collected by ethnographers of pre-Holocaust Jewish Eastern Europe and by researchers in Israel. Her linguistic skills are admirable (she discusses material in German and Polish as well as both Jewish languages), and her book, while it does not altogether avoid professional jargon, is definitely accessible to the nonspecialist.
