Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/194

 6o6 Non-English Writings I stage. The conflict between the older generation of inimigrants and their offspring, who are as a rule out of sympathy with the uncouth "old folks," is a favourite theme with Kobrin, and he portrays masterfully the mute tragedies of the uprooted refu- gees who find in America a measure of material comfort but who are agonized by new customs deeply offensive to their traditions. Of these stories the Versterter Sabath and Thier Numer i of the series A Tenement House are among the best. During the fifteen years of his literary career Kobrin wrote a great deal of fiction, and with the death of Jacob Gordin be- came one of the principal American-Yiddish playwrights. He also enriched Yiddish fiction by creditable translations from Maupassant, Zola, Gorki, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Chekhov, and others. Within the last decade numerous lesser short story writers have arisen. Some of them display qualities that justify hopeful expectations. Proletarian tendencies do not appear in their work. B. Botwinik, though crude in style at times, is arresting and thoughtful. Yenta Serd&tsky has written a number of stories concerning the deracination of the later Jewish-Russian intellectuals who have become a cross between complacent bourgeois and spiritual malcontent. M. Oshero- witz is another of the "skitze" writers whose heroes are ex- clusively of this new type, perhaps the most piteous among all the immigrants. The school of the "young" is also strongly represented in fiction. Its followers have ushered in the longer story and the novel. I. Opatoshu is not a traditional Ghetto writer, for erotic passion is his main subject. His PoUsche Welder, how- ever, is less open to objections on the part of the conservative critic. He has been called the originator of the Yiddish his- torical novel. David Ignatov is a "young" novelist who likes to write of men of indomitable will moving in an atmos- phere of the elemental and the infinite, quite out of the Yiddish realistic tradition. At the risk of being facetious it may be said here that the best Yiddish novel is one written in English. Abraham Cahan's The Rise oj David Levinsky is a better refiection of Jewish life in American surroundings than all American- Yiddish fiction put together. The book is especially interesting to Americans, since