Page:Nine Yiddish Writers.djvu/23

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Morris Rosenfeld

are foreign to him. He ridicules them in his writings and denounces them in his conversation.

And he is as simple and lucid in his style as in his substance. That is his third hold on classic survival. Rosenfeld helped to create and model a literary idiom in Jewish literature. Himself thoroughly saturated with the Jewish spirit, all his verbal inventions are characteristically Yiddish. His coinages are hardly ever rejected, hardly ever modified. He will forever remain an authority on style and idiom.

Speaking from a purely layman's standpoint, Rosenfeld should be thoroughly content with the conquest he has made, with the terrority that is universally conceded to him beyond dispute. To rise out of an obscure sweatshop, out of suffering and disappointment and misery, and to attain those glorious heights of literary fame, is indeed a happiness that befalls only the few chosen by the Gods. But Rosenfeld is not happy. His soul craves for tribute, for incessant worship, for constant reward, and this society refuses to grant him.

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