Yiddish and Jewishness

The Yiddish novelist and short-story writer Joseph Opatoshu was born to a family of lumber merchants near Mlawa in Russian Poland but spent most of his life in the United States, where he settled in 1907. From 1910, he was associated with Di Yunge (The Young Ones), a New York literary circle of young East European immigrants bound together by their shared revolt against the unimaginative social-critical and sentimental conventions of the established immigrant Yiddish literary sphere associated with the labor movement. Opatoshu achieved early renown for his sympathetic, enchanting, and erotically frank portrayals of characters drawn from the Polish Jewish social margins and underworld, most famously in his exuberant 1912 Roman fun a ferd-ganev (a title which can be translated as both A Novel about a Horse-Thief and Romance of Horse-Thief). At the same time, Opatoshu emerged as an acute observer of American Jewish immigrant life in the ghetto. In 1921, he wrote one of the most popular Yiddish historical novels, In Poylishe velder (In Polish Woods), a portrait of a young Jewish man at the turn of the 1860s pulled between Polish Hasidism at the moment of its first great crisis and the romantic world of the Polish national liberation movement. Thereafter, Opatoshu would continue to write works in all three veins: historical fiction, intimate psychological portraiture, and hard-hitting social fiction of everyday life. In the 1930s, he composed moving and alarmed writings about the crisis of European Jewry while briefly drawing close to pro-communist politics. Throughout his life he devoted himself more fully to Yiddishist ideals than most of the American Yiddish writers of his generation; in close cooperation with the families of poets and intellectuals H. Leivick, A. Leyeles, and Fanya Glanz, Opatoshu and his wife Adele raised their children in Yiddish, in a milieu steeped in the new Yiddish culture.