hard discipline of the artist or
of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her
significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she
has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its
predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving
behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider
detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations.

_Immigrants_

The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their
fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is
growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate
department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany,
Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come
passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the
chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with
nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a
civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a
way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and
contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants
write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall
into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the
survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather
than the failures in the process of Americanization.

Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or
gifted at it: the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their
credit. Though these are generally composed by men not born in this
country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most
international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated,
belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the
nation. Shalom Aleichem's _Jewish Children_ and Leon Kobrin's _A
Lithuanian Village_ surely belong, though their scenes are laid in
Europe; as do Sholom Asch's vivid, moving novels _Mottke the
Vagabond_--concerned with the underworld of Poland--and _Uncle
Moses_--concerned with the New York Ghetto--the recent translations of
which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a
really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien
tongue.

There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish
scholar, journalist, novelist, belo