In the introduction to his 1954 book Durkh umbakante lender Hayyim Shoshkes relates a childhood memory of the family gathered over dinner and listening to his father read aloud from a newspaper report about the latest skirmishes in the Spanish-American War. The six-year-old future travel writer was particularly taken by the account of Cuba's beauty and the illuminated entryway to Havana—descriptions that carried his imagination away to far-off places:

At night I dreamed that my wooden horse that stood right next to my bed, took on another form, became large and began to move. . . . Wings sprouted from the horse's back and it became like a creature called Pegasus found in my picture book. I sit on him and he carried me to unfamiliar Cuba, I am lifted higher and higher and fly over the ruins of the Land of Israel and the temples of Baghdad, the city of my storybooks. . . . I fly ever farther, cut through a forest filled with wild animals and jump up with a frightful scream. . . . Next to me stands my father, holds and comforts me. I tell him my dream and he says: "That means, my child, that you will sprout wings, you'll travel a lot, you'll see a great deal! This was a good dream, you have nothing to be afraid of."

Avraham Shoshkes's prophecy did come to pass and for a good forty years his son Hayyim or Henry Shoshkes—as he often called himself— proved to be a ceaseless wanderer and prolific travel writer with some 25 published books to his name, at least half about his journeys, and these mostly compilations of his newspaper reportages about Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Poland and the Soviet Union. His only rival for the title that his friend S. L. Shneiderman conferred on him in a powerful eulogy, that of "the last of the great Jewish wanderers," is Peretz Hirshbein (1880-1948) eleven years his senior, who traveled as extensively, though perhaps not as doggedly, as Shoshkes and published on South and North America, Russia, India and Israel, but whose creative activity was more divided among various talents, from poet and novelist to playwright and travel writer.

Shoshkes's literary talent was undiluted, his writerly ambitions entirely devoted to journalism. But what most distinguishes Shoshkes's oeuvre from Hirshbein's is how closely tied his journeys were to Jewish relief work, and how preoccupied the writing to the social, political, and economic situation of Jews far removed from the center of their people's lives— whose welfare, until his dying day, remained the core of his project.

Lender in shtet is Shoshkes's first compilation, based on travel accounts he wrote between 1924 and 1927. The book is divided into nine sections each devoted to a different region and begins with a five short pieces on the World Exposition in Wembley. Included in the book are reportages that appear over and again in his writings—Egypt, Israel, North Africa and Syria. Less common are his pieces on Spain, Italy and the Balkans since in his later writing Shoshkes preferred more exotic locales. Probably the most interesting section in the book is the final one titled Poyln. These nineteen pieces, which were written in connection with his travels to Poland's periphery on behalf of the cooperative banking movement, contain some of Shoshkes's most interesting work. They demonstrate how the consummate travel writer hardly needs a foreign locale to work his craft but they also suggest how exotic the periphery must have seemed to many of Shoshkes's readers in Warsaw's Jewish daily newspaper Haynt.