The Panic, or, The Town of Hérres

Considered the first popular writer of Yiddish fiction, Isaac (Ayzik) Meyer Dik (also known by the acronym Amad) was born in Vilna. A maskil who encouraged Jewish educational and sartorial reform and admired Tsar Alexander II for his liberalism, Dik observed Jewish practice throughout his life. He initially began writing in Hebrew around 1838 but later wrote exclusively in Yiddish. His stories have a direct, unadorned, and sometimes heavily didactic style, yet his descriptive power and sense of humor made them enormously popular. “The Panic, or The Town of Hérres” (hérres meaning “havoc” in Hebrew) describes the tumult when an “evil” decree prohibiting child marriages hits the town and the parents rush to avert it by marrying off all their children at once. His more than three hundred widely circulated stories and short novels (generally issued by Vilna’s Romm publishing house) were designed both to entertain readers and to instruct them in moral values and the teachings of the Haskalah, often through parody, satire, sentimentality, and melodrama. Despite their wide circulation and influence on later Yiddish writers, many of his works have not survived.