Review - American Jewish Archives

236 American Jewish Archives
Los Angeles and New York. What ironies must have attended these
journeys and last years - some of the New Yorkish writers living into
the 1970s; Shea Tenenbaum and Shimshon Apter into the eighties.
They aged as their Yiddish-reading public diminished; their recog-
nizable Jewish New York garment district became the entry point of
the labor market for Hispanics and Orientals. Their struggles for
class-consciousness, for solidarity, and for unionization were left
behind by the affluent and rising lives of the Yiddish-speaking im-
migrants' children. After the '1950s, the representative writers of
American Jewish life - children of immigrants -recorded their pas-
sage out of urban ghettoes and discussed the embarrassment of
choices they had in America: careers, houses, lovers, identities, and re-
ligions. These authors were not enclave writers. Their past, so their
works argue, was not a future to be achieved. They wanted their
characters to participate in the capacious and worldly present.
The stories in New Yorkish are secular and often disputatious,
critiquing the American dream by often dealing with the laboring
day and an economy of "seasonal" work portrayed in terms of per-
sonal life. The New Yorkish writers knew that there is an economy
of, and in, passion. Protagonists bemoan their dark fate and be-
come helpless as jobs and enterprises collapse.
These writers discovered that character is richer than its cir-
cumstances. It seems to me that the stories in this work fight against
abstraction, in gathering the social immensity of individuality that
can be revealed only at the moment pressure is applied to the pre-
sent. The conservatism of the will is revealed. What might start to
read as a simple proletarian tale, Peretz Hirshbein's moving 'At the
Threshold:' for instance, cuts against the grain of expected historical
materialism. In Europe, a young girl whose mother accepts a sewing
machine and a free apartment is promised to a rich American suitor.
He pays for her passage to America, but she refuses to marry him,
never leaving the boat on which she came. Staring over the ship's
rail at the New York she will not enter, she sees "clearly the house
and the room where her sewing machine stood facing the old wil-
low tree. A breeze blew through its branches and the leaves
dropped to the damp autumn earth outside her window"(180).
Many of the New Yorkish protagonists live within what they per-
ceive as America, the New York that binds them to the sweatshops