As a little girl in the Ukraine, Marie Bloch used to listen to her grandmother tell these folktales which are as familiar to Ukrainian children as Little Red Riding Hood is to American children. It was too bad, Mrs. Bloch thought, that American children didn't also know about Pán Kotsky, Seerko and The Spiteful Nanny Goat.

In order to tell these stories again just as they were told in the Ukraine, it was necessary first to find them in a book. Mrs. Bloch searched libraries in the United States, Canada and Europe before she found what she was looking for. Then she began translating, finding the right English words to carry the meaning of the original Ukrainian. Remembering how these stories sounded when her grandmother told them, Mrs. Bloch wanted them not only to read well but to sound well when read aloud. So before settling on a final form, she read them aloud on a tape recorder and listened to them as they were played back.

The result is the book you have, a book about roosters and goats, dogs and cats, that children in a faraway country have been listening to and laughing at for hundreds of years just as you are doing today.

From inside the book