WHEN PAUPERS DANCE: COMING OF AGE IN PRE-WORLD WAR II POLAND. Renglich, Szloma. Translated from the Yiddish by Zigmund Jampel. Montreal. Vehicule Press. 1988. 228pp, paper, $12.95. ISBN 0-919890-79-2. Distributed by University of Toronto Press. CIP Grades 7 and up Reviewed by Jean Farquharson Volume 16 Number 6 1988 November This is an autobiographical novel about Schloime Renglich, a Jewish boy born in 1912 in Lublin, Poland, the son of a poor shoemaker. When his father is taken to fight for the tsar when World War I breaks out, his mother has to support her family while the grandmother cares for the children. Schloime describes his mother's desperate efforts to keep the family alive year after year until the father returns from the war. When they realize that the father will not return, Schloime leaves school to apprentice as a shoemaker and later to sell baked goods and apprentice as a tailor. Unable to make ends meet, his mother goes to Warsaw to work for an uncle and then vanishes. Through the love, hope and strength of his people and sheer will-power, Schloime and his family survived the hunger, exasperation and humiliation of their poverty. Schloime emigrated with his wife and five children to Montreal in 1958, where he was reunited with his sister and continued his work as a tailor. Although Renglich is not a professional writer, he is an excellent story-teller. Jean Farquharson, Brantford C.I. &. V.S., Brentford, Ont.