Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[605] generate. He does not protest, accuse, or denounce, as does his brother poet; he is simply a recorder of the multiform hell of the Ghetto. His genuine pathos lies in the simplicity and accuracy of his tales. ‘The life of the Jewish workmen in New York is the life I know best,’ he writes in his autobiography. ‘My Muse was born in the dark sweat shop, her first painful cry resounded near the Singer machine, she was brought up in the tenement tombs.’ In his later years, when the more objectionable aspects of the sweat shop were gradually becoming extinct, Libin relaxed somewhat, and admitted a little humour to his stories. But essentially he remained the Ghetto writer, with a talent for the cheerless, the desolate. Z. Levin is another of the realistic ‘skitze’ writers. Many of his stories are meritorious, but with all the correctness of his realism, with all his insight into human motives, he leaves the reader cold. Only the worshippers of realism as a cult enjoy him.

Of much bigger calibre is Leon Kobrin (born in Russia in 1872). His literary debut was in Russian, and when he came to New York in 1892 he was surprised to hear that there was such a thing as literature in Yiddish or ‘jargon,’ as the vernacular was contemptuously called in Russia. Nevertheless he joined hands with the inspired band of intellectuals and propagandists led by Abraham Cahan, Philip Krantz, and Benjamin Feigenbaum, and began contributing to the socialist publications in the vernacular, shelving his squeamishness and wielding his pen from right to left as best he could. In 1894 he published his first story, A Moerder aus Liebe. It attracted universal attention, and Kobrin became a Yiddish writer.

Kobrin is a realist but he is more than that. He knows the value of artistic selection and arrangement, and is something of a virtuoso of the short story. His subjects are not all of American life. He still dwells caressingly on places and characters of the old home. In his Litwisch Staedtel, written in 1914 and ‘dedicated to my old father and mother,’ the obscure town in the Lithuanian Ghetto is treated with a love and a reminiscential tenderness worthy of a better place. In his stories of Jewish life in America he gives us vivid pictures of the life of the poor, though he does not emphasize the sombre colours. The dramatic quality of his talent is manifest in many of his tales, of which some were adapted by the author for the