One Of Rombro's Works Explained

Jakov Rombro (Filip Krantz) wrote his Zapiski sumashedshego orem-bohera [Notes of a crazy orem bocher (a poor guy)] during the pogrom years, although he does not mention the pogroms. It is again an autobiography, or rather a first-person narrative about the typically tormented life of a young Jew who wants to find his way out of his sufferings - those he endured in the traditional Jewish school, the prison of the Talmud, the suffering of the social outcast - and he becomes a vagabond. Rombro lets his hero wander and meet different people in order to show the prototypes of different solutions. There is a dream at the very end of the novel, a parable very much reminiscent of the famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevski's novel The Brothers Karamazov. In this dream Moses descends from Heaven to Earth to see whether Satan is right about Jews deserving to be annihilated. Moses understands nothing of the synagogue ritual and finds that the Jews do not observe his (Moses') laws, and after a debate in which it turns out that he knows nothing about the Talmud he has to run away. The author also ran away: Rombro left Russia for London, then New York in 1883 where he was a collaborator on Yiddish periodicals.

Source: Plit In Tw rd Ubled? Zsuzsa Hetenyi: An article by Iosif Bikerman, published in 1910.