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Book <strong>Review</strong>s 235<br />
Rosenfeld, Max.<br />
New Yorkish and Other <strong>American</strong> Yiddish Stories.<br />
Introduction by Sanford Pinsker.<br />
Philadelphia, Pa.: Sholom Aleichem Club Press<br />
and the Congress of Secular <strong>Jewish</strong> Organizations. 1995.266<br />
pages.<br />
Max Rosenfeld, who has selected and translated these stories, many<br />
of which appeared in the Zukunft, points out that in addition to their<br />
New York setting, they are concerned with the relationships between<br />
men and women. The stories' uniqueness, he suggests, is that they<br />
"deal with immigrant Jews in this country, and . . . the participants<br />
expressed their deepest feelings in Yiddish."<br />
There is much more to say. This volume repeatedly depicts those<br />
without power and without success. New Yorkish enlarges <strong>American</strong><br />
political writing by depicting characters who help make <strong>American</strong><br />
life but rarely shape it. Civic writing, such as this, deepens our under-<br />
standing of society by rescuing the lives of those who rarely become<br />
part of our nation's official history. We are reminded that we have fre-<br />
quently ignored the very human dreams and desires that make up a<br />
national consciousness. On the one hand, this volume presents indi-<br />
viduals longing for a redemptive love that usually never happens<br />
or offers an occasion reducing a life to the moment of its pathos. On<br />
the other hand, aspirations such as success, autonomy, and even a<br />
hoped-for community are depicted as <strong>American</strong> fables, never to be<br />
realized by those who believe in them. As a result, New Yorkish keeps<br />
the full range of human life -its disappointments and endurance -<br />
within our national literature and history.<br />
The writers collected in this volume lived through the years in<br />
which <strong>American</strong> <strong>Jewish</strong> life became conscious of itself as paradoxical.<br />
It widened its understanding of modernity as it lost its intimacy<br />
with the past. It marked out its literary landscape as it forgot its re-<br />
ligious and folkloric centers. The authors in this volume recorded this<br />
development; they lived it. Their origins are in Russia, Lithuania,<br />
Poland, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia; many of their lives end in cities<br />
suggestive of the explosiveness and exhaustion of national dreams -
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