I want to thank Pablo Capra and Savannah Daniels for their invaluable help and support in scanning and locating and organizing the illustrations. I could not have done it without them. My deepest thanks also to the archivists at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and especially Vital Zajka, for his help in locating and providing the illustrations in a usable form. Thanks also to Dan Opatoshu for going to bat for me when I needed it. Thanks to J. Hoberman, author of that wonderful book on the Yiddish cinema, Bridge of Light, for help with a few of the stills I wanted from the Bund’s documentary about their Medem Sanitarium, Mir Kumen On. Finally, a great big “thank you” to Leo Melamed: this book would have had a paucity of illustrations if not for his magnanimous generosity.
Most of all, I am extremely grateful to Dr. Jack Jacobs for his invaluable and generous help. He suggested many, many emendations to my typescript, saving me from some grievous errors in several places. Any such errors still existing, large or small, are of course solely my own.
Victor Gilinsky, who wrote an introduction to this book, contributed some editorial suggestions and comments, for which I am also grateful. He was the one who urged me to translate this book. If not for that, I may not have done it.