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[606] stage. The conflict between the older generation of immigrants 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 refugees 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 became 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 Serdatsky 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. Osherowitz is another of the ‘skitze’ writers whose heroes are exclusively 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 Polische Welder, however, is less open to objections on the part of the conservative critic. He has been called the originator of the Yiddish historical novel. David Ignatov is a ‘young’ novelist who likes to write of men of indomitable will moving in an atmosphere 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 of David Levinsky is a better reflection of Jewish life in American surroundings than all American-Yiddish fiction put together. The book is especially interesting to Americans, since
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