I. L. Peretz

Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers.

[4] Unlike many other Maskilim, he greatly respected the Hasidic Jews for their mode of being in the world; at the same time, he understood that there was a need to make allowances for human frailty.

[5] Mostly taught by private tutors, he received a traditional Jewish education in Hebrew and rabbinic texts, and for a short time, at around the age of 13, studied at yeshivot in Zamość and the nearby town of Szczebrzeszyn.

[6] When he was around 18 years old, his parents arranged his marriage to Sarah, the daughter of the Hebrew author Gabriel Judah Lichtenfeld,[5] whom Liptzin describes as a "minor poet and philosopher".

[8] He found temporary work in 1890 as a member of an expedition, sponsored by philanthropist Jan Bloch, to conduct a statistical survey of Polish Jews; his experiences visiting small towns and villages of the Tomaszów province in southeastern Poland became the basis of his fictional sketches Bilder fun a Provints-Rayze (Pictures from a Provincial Journey).

[6] His first published Yiddish work, the long ballad Monish, appeared in 1888, as his contribution to the landmark anthology Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek (Jewish People's Library), edited by Sholem Aleichem.

[7] Peretz assisted other Yiddish writers in publishing their work, including his lifelong friend Jacob Dinezon, Der Nister[9] and Lamed Shapiro.

[11] Towards the end of his life, as refugees poured into Warsaw from the war zone between Russia and Germany, Peretz and fellow author Jacob Dinezon helped found an orphanage and establish schools for displaced Jewish children.

Liptzin characterizes him as both a realist – "an optimist who believed in the inevitability of progress through enlightenment" – and a romanticist, who "delved into irrational layers of the soul and sought to set imaginations astir with visions of Messianic possibilities.

"Bontsche" is the story of an extremely meek and modest man, downtrodden, abused and neglected during his life on earth, but exalted by the angels when he arrives in heaven because he never complained, fought back, or protested the treatment he was subjected to while still alive.

While the angels expected him to ask for something profound such as the arrival of the messiah and/or the redemption, which they would have granted him, instead all his abused and downtrodden imagination can muster is to ask for "a warm roll with a little bit of butter every morning."

The ending is a powerful, almost shocking, critique on what Peretz believes is the misguided Jewish elevation as an ideal to accept stoically every blow, persecution, injustice and deprivation that has been the fate of the Jews since their exile from their homeland in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.