the language which gentiles could understand, with enthusiasm and unqualified approval.
The writings of Samuel Gordon are now less known or read than they were ten years ago. Mr. Gordon gained in the reflection of the glory that was Zangwill's. He wrote more, but less was expected from him. He knew more of Jewish life, but he had less cleverness, less lightness of touch, and was altogether incapable of fathoming the life of Jews, either in their new home in England, or in their old home in Russia, which he had left many years before.
The Ghetto was then an object of great interest. The Jews, it was felt in England and in America, were to be seen at their picturesque best in the so-called Ghetto. There was ample room for color, for variation, for the aroma of alienism which is somewhat familiar, and as such, with the growth of the slumming idea in vogue in society, the Ghetto literature acquired a standing. Mr. Gordon, however, and his colleagues, men like Cahn, Herman Bernstein, Ezra Brudno, J. K. Friedman, Bruno Lessing, and others whom it is unnecessary to mention. were building on the changing foundations of Jewish life, and essentially they were not writing for Jews, but for the foreign market. Had they been writing with the knowledge that their work was being done for Jews, they might have progressed with the Jewish people. But their vision was adjusted to the market of those curiosity-seekers who found in the Jews the revelation of a strange people, and as a result, when their patrons shifted their point of interest, the Ghetto writers were left stranded, unable to hold their own. They still give the public the benefit of their occasional incursions into the life of the Jews as it was lived some time ago; they are still regarded with a peculiar veneration by those who are proud of the fact that Jewish life too has been portrayed in the language of their adoption, but as vital forces in the development of a Jewish literature in English, dealing with the specific problems of Jewish life and character, they are altogether negligible factors. Their day has passed. They are now obsolete and worth consideration only as object lessons, as historical incidents in the transition of Jewish life in the Anglo-Saxon world.
A new period has arrived in English-Jewish literature, if literature it may be called. It is the journalistic-fiction school. They force their way into the magazines, into the daily press, and they aim at giving the superficial but entertaining glimpses of Jewish life for the edition of gentiles and of that large army of Jews who are better classified as goyim than as Jews. Their appeal is to the curiosity of the readers. With that curiosity comes a certain cheap pride in seeing revealed in the same superficial manner as all life is revealed in the periodicals, the life of Jews as well, which, to their ignorant minds, is a revelation of the fact that in this new world also Jews have come into their own. It is the school of journalists who are exploiting the superficial in Jewish life, and its exponents are both Jews and gentiles; in some cases, the gentiles exhibiting even a better understanding of Jewish life than the Jews. Of these writers, there are three or four who stand out. They are, first, Myra Kelly, who has passed away, Bruno Lessing, Montague Glass, and James Oppenheim.
Bruno Lessing is the offspring of the Zangwill school, but he is still manufacturing stories for the periodicals on the same pattern. The unknown, as a rule, is either ludicrous or pathetic. Or, if one is at a loss for samples of the two qualities mentioned, the sentimental may also be used. Lessing uses all three brands. His stories are always ludicrous, sentimental or pathetic. But having no true vision, working with no understanding of the life or its symbols, he writes stories that to a Jew seem utterly lacking in the barest essentials of truth. He has no conception of the ideals of Jews. He knows nothing of their hopes, the manner in which they endure sorrow, their characteristic expressions of grief or happiness. He conceives of stories with no relation to their background. His sketches have no depth. They are silhouettes, in fact, with dabs of color drawn from the material surroundings of his subjects. Being incapable of seeing the developments in Jewish life, his stock of ideas is limited and stationary. He glues his stories together: but they do not adhere in the memory of the reader. He is a workman laboring for alien employers, and is himself an alien to all Jewish thought or life. James Oppenheim is the writer of a num-