8: Text excerpt, Jacob Sloan’s review of an English translation of "The Brief Travels of Benjamin III,” 1949.

8: Text excerpt, Jacob Sloan’s review of an English translation of "The Brief Travels of Benjamin III,” 1949.

From resource kit: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh's "The Brief Travels of Benjamin III"

Jacob Sloan wrote a controversial review of a 1949 English translation of the novella.

Suggested Activity: Read the quotation from Sloan’s review. Ask students: Do you agree with Sloan? What do you see as possibly mitigating this view? Then have students write their own reviews of the novella.

Source: Jacob Sloan, “The Travels of Benjamin the Third, by Mendele Mocher Seforim,” Commentary (Nov. 1949), 510.