Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/192

 6o4 Non-English Writings I haps, of his nature poems, where he stands supreme among Yiddish poets in his fine sense of landscape. His translation of Hiawatha would be excellent were it not for the occasional dissonance of foreign words. His Jewish themes are permeated with a romantic charm. Yehoush also made valuable contribu- tions to the study of Yiddish. His Yiddish dictionary is a helpful volume to all who write the dialect. That Yiddish poetry has a future is strongly contended by the " young," as the rebels of Yiddish rhyme like to style them- selves. The conservative Yiddish reader frowns at them ; to the Ghetto writer they are anathema ; but they are fascinating, like all rebels. The time is not yet ripe to give a just estimate of the individual representatives of this promising school: Mani Leib, M. L. Halpern, Joseph Rolnik, for example. Speaking of Mani Leib the "young" critic Noah Steinberg says that he shook off all proletarian and nationalistic tradi- tions. This they all did. Whether they are proselytes or mere renegades remains to be seen. They are still in the ferment. ' The short story or ' ' Skitze ' ' is the prevalent form of Yiddish fiction. It owes its continued existence not so much to choice as to the exigencies of Yiddish literature in America. In the absence of a book market to speak of — until very recently at any rate — practically all Yiddish literature produced in the United States was first printed in the dailies and weeklies. This cir- cumstance, together with the fact that most of the Yiddish writers until lately have had to lead a precarious existence without leisure for longer works, has fostered the short story form, ill-suited as it is to the talents of some of its users, Z. Libin (Israel Hurowits, born in Russia in 1872) occu- pies in American Yiddish fiction the place that Rosenfeld occupies in poetry, though much less talented and relatively free from nationalistic themes. His realism was inspired by the Russian masters at whose altar most of the Yiddish-Amer- ican writers still worship, but his themes are predominantly local. He writes of the Jewish workman in the sweat shop, in the pestiferous tenement house, in the slums of the summer resorts. He treats of poverty, unemplojmient, misery, dis- ease, the "white plague," and all the agonies of soul that these 'As this chapter was written in 1918 it does not chronicle the interesting development of these "young" writers during the past two years.