"This book is a sort of pilgrimage among the cities and
inhabitants of a world which only yesterday--as history
goes--harboured the grandfathers and grandmothers
of some millions of American citizens. . . .
The world of Sholom Aleichem is mostly--not wholly
--the internal world of Russian Jewry forty, fifty, sixty,
and seventy years ago. It is--again mostly--the world
of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, with special emphasis
on a section south and west and east of Kiev. . . ."