Nine Yiddish Writers/Foreword
FOREWORD
In the assembling and publication in book-form of these appreciations of Yiddish writers by Harry Rogoff there is an appropriateness that is especially marked at this time: the old gods of Yiddish writing are securely enthroned; the new are yet enshrouded in uncertainty.
At such a time it is well to turn back these interesting pages of Yiddish literary history in America. Random though these notations may be, they are peep-holes through which the observant eye may gather some estimate of the scope and liveliness of that literary activity which engaged the lover of Yiddish literature a decade or two ago. In these pages, taken out of the short-lived journal "East and West," of which Mr. Rogoff was the editor, the student no less than the casual reader may find instruction as well as pleasure.
In these brief essays, filled with intimate observations on the lives and work of representative Yiddish writers, we are brought into contact with a mind that has been at all times keenly responsive to the creative forces in Jewish life, helpfully proud of the best impulses, intellectual and spiritual, in the Jewish community. For here, set down at a time when reputations were still in the balance, are judgments which time has sustained and insights which are no less pointed because they have won general acceptance.
It must be clear to that friend of Yiddish literature, who is also a reader in it, that these critical sketches of Rogoff's have their validity in our own time. A reading of them, fifteen years after they were written, shows that they were a natural outgrowth of that movement of self-analysis and self-criticism of which American Yiddish literature stood so greatly in need. Although creative workers are never too numerous, Yiddish writers were plentiful. The controversies of the, day pointed to the need of some clarification of the diverse impulses which were alive in the literary movements of those days.
To that unsettled period Rogoff brought his contribution of a sound critical mind reinforced by familiarity with the criteria that have shaped the great literatures of the world.
His discernment and critical honesty gave him the right to set up those criteria of artistic integrity so sorely needed by writers who were wholly absorbed in the battle of the work-a-day world. The Yiddish writer, knowing few of the comforts that come with the support of a leisured middle-class, has always been in the midst of that daily battle for a livelihood.
"To be sincere and faithful in art is as difficult as to be sincere and faithful in other activities of life," is a view with which Rogoff admonished these writers. Whereupon he pointed out that the artist's mission is "to see life as it is and to depict it in its own colors,"—the comic together with the grim; the idealistic and the noble, together with the sordid; the hopeful as well as the despairing; the tender and poetic as validly as the brutal. In other words, Rogoff was spokesman of the idea that the artist dare not take sides in the business of life since he has business in his own domain, with demands and standards, with purposes and ideals that are sufficiently exacting to call for the very best in the artist.
Varied as are the subjects of these essays, this one point of view informs them all the vigorous insistence on the integrity of the writer. There must be "no compromise," says Rogoff, "but (only) a firm faith in one's art." Again and again he raises his voice against the inclination, on the part of some of these men he speaks for, to yield to the forces external to their own sincerest impulses.
Nor is Rogoff one-sided in his appreciation. Given over to an interest and a genuine enjoyment of the work of the realist, he is capable at the same time of generous acceptance and interpretation of the sincere production of such originals as L. Shapiro and Jonah Rosenfeld. In viewing such work, Rogoff stands by the individual promptings of the writer, with no preconceptions and no exactions other than that the artist create firmly and persuasively in his own image.
If it is a new world which the writer has created, one which the reader cannot verify by the test of "life as it is," and "in its own colors," Rogoff asks whether it takes shape and color, dimension and dynamic reality from the authentic vision which has fostered it. If so, he is for it. Thus he says of a story by Shapiro: "The story is not real, but it is a great achievement, nevertheless. For an artist has conceived it, nurtured it, loved it, named it with his own light, strengthened it with his blood. It has existence because an artist has created it."
One must conclude that the magazine "East and West," which was the occasion of excellent pioneer work in the presentation of Yiddish writing to American readers, was the occasion also of presenting to Yiddish writers a critic who spoke for them with sympathy, courage, and discernment.