Samson Solomon and His Horses
Published in Issue #22 Translated from Yiddish by Miri Koral subscribe to unlock the full storyA Note to the Reader from the Hebrew Publishing Company, the original publisher of this work in 1909:
This distinguished work was published in book form in Warsaw and this little chapbook enflamed all of Russia because it is an enormous critique against Czar Nicholas and his government and it is wildly popular.
Circumventing the censor that forces the writer to write everything in a hidden manner, Mr. Dinezon wove his sharp critique into a wonderful story of a coachman who sits on his coach and drives five horses.
The coachman is the czar and the coach his throne.
The five horses are the five classes of Russian subjects. The white horse is the nobility; the brown, the philistines. The spotted horse is the peasants and workers. The old mare, Jews. And the young pony—the intelligentsia, the revolutionaries. The flies are meant to be the rioters, the pogromists.
This story was dedicated by Jacob Dinezon to the writer of “The Old Mare,” Reb Mendele Mokher Sforim
“If you say, ‘One’s thoughts during the day are what one dreams at night,’ it’s an idea worth ten times nothing!” says Samson Solomon. Do you need anything more than that? I myself dreamed a dream the other night which could never be something I thought about during the day.
Listen, however, to a story that can be dreamed by an old Jew, a former coachman in his youth.
I pondered for an entire day. What can an impoverished Jew ponder? My tough livelihood; the need for bread, clothes, a rental place...
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