Dorothy Kraus Memoir - Editing/Production

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Dorothy Kraus Memoir

Editing/Production
As may be seen by viewing the original images, Dorothy Kraus' memoir did not go beyond the manuscript stage. It was a product of the typewriter era.

It has been suggested that Dorothy set out to reproduce the voice of a child, herself at age 10 or so. (Do you agree? If so, did she succeed?) From the point of view of the editors of this project, Dorothy was, in any case, a literate and disciplined writer.

For web presentation, the original approximately 70 manuscript pages have been reformatted and slightly reorganized into approximately 90 web pages.

Here are some comments on her text and how it was edited for this web presentation:

Word choice: Modern readers will find some of her word choices archaic. (For example, her use of ghetto, on this introductory page. Refer to the Notes for commentary on this usage.)

Spelling: The very few spelling errors and oddities in the manuscript--such as use of a British forrefm instead of American-- have been corrected without comment.

The Town Name: Dorothy called her town Wysoka Litovsk, a rendering in English of how she and her Yiddish-speaking family would have pronounced the official Russian town name as it was prior to World War I. In all but the introduction, this has been replaced here by the Polish equivalent, Wysokie Litewskie, for consistency.

Grammar: The very few grammatical issues have been corrected without comment.

Unreadable text: The few cases of unreadable text have been replaced with what was very likely intended by the author.

Section Breaks: Dorothy used a centered row of x's

xxxxxxxxxxxx

where, apparently, she intended the reader to see a shift in the narrative as to subject, time, or emphasis. In some cases, partly because she provided no section headers, it is difficult to understand what Dorothy had in mind, but all these breaks have been preserved in the paging and/or subtitling of the current presentation. Additional breaks have been added with an eye to readability.

Page Size: A priority for readability was keeping the content of each web page short enough to fit on most computer monitors, so the content could be viewed without scrolling -- when doing so did not interfere with the narrative.

Subheadings: Though Dorothy used symbolic Section Breaks throughout the document, she provided no subheadings at allin the manuscript body -- or in the original Table of Contents, which describes 61 pages of unbroken narrative.

Paragraphing: Purists will notice the disappearance of indentation (5 spaces) marking the beginning of each paragraph. This convention has been slowly disappearing in the paper world, replaced by double-line breaks between paragraphs. In the web environment, using indentation to mark a paragraph start is even less convenient and is no longer standard practice.. Each of Dorothy's paragraphs have been preserved, and some additional paragraphs have been created where helpful for clarity or to give an opportunity for a clarifying subhead.

References to original manuscript pages: These are given in the Notes section at the bottom of each page.

Typographic Conventions: [Square Brackets] enclose material that is not in the original and has been added by the editors for clarity. (As mentioned above, simple corrections have been made without comment.) Non-English words or phrases are usually rendered in italics. Most of these are Yiddish. Dorothy's practice was to follow these by English translations in parentheses, and this has been followed without modification. English words requiring special emphasis are also rendered in italics. (See also Introductory Material for use of italics.)

Introductory Material: To add clarity,the editors have added summaries at the beginning of distinct segments of Dorothy's material. To emphasize that these are not Dorothy's words, the entire text of these are italicized.

Editor's Notes:

Page Last Updated: 17-Nov-2012