About the book: year / Yushkevich (Semyon Solomonovich) is a talented writer. Born in 1868, into a wealthy Odessa-Jewish family. Graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. He made his debut in print with the story "The Tailor" in "Russian Wealth" in 1897. In 1895 he wrote the story "Disintegration", but not a single editor dared to publish it. Meanwhile, it was this story, finally published in 1902 in Voskhod, that created Yu’s fame. After that, he published his fiction and dramatic works in the “World of God”, “Magazine for Everyone”, “Education”, collections of “Knowledge” and others. Some of Yu's works were translated into German and Hebrew, and the Znanie partnership published two volumes of his stories (St. Petersburg, 1906). In the story “Disintegration” Yu. showed how the foundations of the old Jewish life, urban and bourgeois, are disintegrating, the old social life is disintegrating, losing the restraint of external organization, still remaining from the former internal cohesion: Jewish life, still strong in its unity, its moral stability, is disintegrating a family not bound by any spiritual supreme principle, distorted by the frantic struggle for life. The images of this struggle are Yushkevich’s nightmare. In “Ita Gain”, “The Jews”, “Our Sisters” he unfolded a stunning picture of the world of urban scum, with its boundless grief, hunger, crimes, pimps, “factories of angels”, prostitution that had become part of everyday life. Yu loves to find sublime images here, pure among the dirt that clings to them, romantically elevated. This elation and artificiality is the enemy of his realism. Many of his works, generally well conceived (the dramas “Hunger”, “The City”, the stories “Our Sisters”, “The New Prophet”) are in places completely spoiled by mannerism, which, in pursuit of some special truth of life, turns away from its elementary truth. But even in these works there are glimpses of significant strength and captivating tenderness. Particularly characteristic of the internal contradictions of Yushkevich’s talent is the language of his characters, sometimes roughly translated from the “jargon” spoken by the Jewish masses, sometimes something special, rhetorically pompous. In Yushkevich's dramas there is little movement, and the characters, characterized not so much by actions as by monotonously loud conversations, are very little individualized. The exception is Yushkevich's last drama "The King", which has scenic and ideological merits. A national writer par excellence, Yushkevich is essentially far from being the Jewish writer of everyday life that he is commonly considered to be. He is relatively little interested in everyday life, he, in essence, is not an observer of external everyday trifles and willingly grasps only the general contours of life; That’s why his image is sometimes vague, rough and tasteless, but never petty or insignificant. On the other hand, one feels that the depiction of Jewry is not an ethnographic goal for him: Yushkevich’s Jewry is only the environment most familiar to him, in which general forms of life develop. A. Gornfeld.