SOURCE: Jacobson, Matthew Frye. “‘The Quintessence of the Jew’: Polemics of Nationalism and Peoplehood in Turn-of-the-Century Yiddish Fiction.” In Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors, pp. 103-11. New York and London: New York University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Jacobson discusses the changing nature of Jewish identity in America through the works of Cahan and other Yiddish writers.]

Among the first and most famous pieces of Yiddish literature in the United States is Yekl, Abraham Cahan's account of a tragicomic Russian Jew who wants nothing more than to become, in his words, “a real Yankee feller.” Because it found its way into English early on (it appeared in Yiddish in 1893 and in English in 1895), the novella has attracted more critical attention and has reached a wider audience than any other piece of Yiddish-American fiction. Indeed, Yekl was introduced to an English-speaking audience, amid much fanfare, by none other than the “Dean of American letters,” a laudatory and enthusiastic William Dean Howells.

Howell's involvement seems to have forever stamped Yekl as a certain kind of novel accomplishing certain kinds of cultural work: Cahan has become a cultural ambassador, by most accounts, who served up the Jewish ghetto and made it accessible for an audience far broader than the Yiddish-speaking readership of the Lower East Side. From the outset the piece was received on the American literary scene as a work about America itself—about the trials and tribulations of immigrants to America, about the prospects of absorption by America, about the ghetto, a new and fascinating (if troubling) social zone in America. While Cahan's keen depiction of “ghetto types” has been noted over the years, more often it is the ghetto itself that commands critical attention in the United States. The novella, at bottom, becomes a work about its own setting.¹

But it may prove a fruitful exercise to translate Yekl, as it were, back into Yiddish. What if the novella had never been rendered in English? What if it existed only in its original Yiddish version, and there had been no dean of American letters to popularize it among the genteel readers of the Atlantic Monthly? What would we be saying about it then? The novella is doubly paradigmatic: on the one hand, the Yiddish text is paradigmatic of a polemic current regarding the meaning and basis of Jewishness that ran through much Yiddish writing on both sides of the Atlantic in this period; the American, English-language reception of the novella, on the other hand, is paradigmatic of a certain blindness in American literary history to the transnational dimensions of “ethnic” literatures. The work of resituating Yekl within the Yiddish culture of the immigrant ghetto and its transnational intelligentsia is instructive not simply because there is still a great deal to say about the piece but because what there is to say no longer has much to do with “America” at all—with America as an idea, America as an ideal, or America as a piece of failed magic. Yekl, in Yiddish, that is, engaged transnational debates regarding the essence of Jewish character—its basis, its nature, and its possibilities; debates occasioned by the complex of crises known at the time as “The Jewish Question.” The historic convergence in the 1890s of horrific pogroms in the East (to which Jews were so vulnerable because they had not assimilated at all) and the anti-Semitic upsurging around the Dreyfus Affair in the West (to which Jews were so vulnerable because they had assimilated so thoroughly) raised urgent and perplexing questions about the Jews' collective destiny. In this context the literary/political theme of “Americanization”—as in Yekl—represented not simply a melting-pot American tale but another of the possible fates to be met by the Jews, alongside their terrorization in Russia and their demonization in France. The porous texture of an American political culture deemed so desirable and inviting by some “Yekls” newly arrived from the Old World raised questions about the social possibilities inhering in Jewish identity—not just collective destiny but the very basis of Jewish collectivity.²

A rereading of Yekl in this context, moreover, opens a window on a range of Yiddish literary productions of the period, including the stories, sketches, and dramatic works of Leon Kobrin, Jacob Gordin, and Bernard Goren; and the poetry of Morris Winchevsky, Abraham Liessen, and Morris Rosenfeld. Like Yekl, these works were generated within a social and political context in which Yiddish thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic were absorbed with the question of Jewish identity itself, and its ideal relation to the other racial, ethnic, religious, or national identities on the world scene. Dos pintele yid, the quintessence of the Jew, was a sharply contested notion precisely because its properties—whatever they turned out to be—seemed to hold the key to collective action and hence to collective well-being.

At the heart of much Jewish political discussion in the late nineteenth century was the pressing question, on the Yiddish left, of whether Jews should enter the international workers' movement as Jews or as (assimilated) members of the various host countries within which they lived. The question was not a simple one: on the one hand, what did Jewish identity even mean in the context of a secularized socialist movement?—what did Jewishness consist of in the case of the nonreligious “Jew”? And on the other hand, as long as even secularized, assimilated Jews continued so often to be persecuted as Jews, how could the international workers' movement expect them so readily to drop their identity as specifically Jewish workers?

Polar philosophies crystallized around this question throughout the 1880s and 1890s—cosmopolitanists at one end of the spectrum, nationalists of various stripes (including labor Zionists) at the other. Even for some Jews the anti-Semitic violence of the Russian peasantry in the 1880s looked like a lamentable phase in an otherwise promising political awakening on the part of “the Russian people”; Jews should stop thinking of themselves as Jews at all, and should applaud (as Russians) the seeming rise of a Russian proletarian movement. For others, the Russian pogroms were the most powerful proof of the primacy of Jewish identity, offering a stark, dramatic plea for a Jewish movement of self-defense or even a Jewish homeland.³ In both cases the conception of Jewish identity held the key to broader interpretations of Russian politics and socialist organization.

It was none other than Abraham Cahan who most clearly laid out the argument in favor of a distinctly Yiddishist commitment to socialism—a formula by which neither the “Jewish” nor the “worker” in Jewish working-class identity could be dismissed. At an international convention of socialists in Brussels in 1891, Cahan introduced a resolution calling on the socialist movement to denounce (and implicitly, renounce) anti-Semitism of all stripes. “The Jews are persecuted,” he argued:

Pogroms are made upon them. They are insulted, they are oppressed. Exceptional laws are made for them. They have been made into a separate class of people with no rights. These people with no rights want to struggle right alongside all other proletarians and they request a place in the ranks of the social democracy. The anti-Semitic Russian press attacks the Jews, and tries to create the impression that everyone hates us, including the workers. I therefore demand that you declare before the world that this is a lie—that you are the enemy of all exploiters, Christian as well as Jewish ones; that you love Jewish workers as well as Christian ones.⁴

This complex, often strained commitment to both socialism and Jewishness was at the very center of Yiddish discussion in the 1890s and after. It colored the editorial policy of papers like the Jewish Daily Forward; it crystallized in the General Jewish Workers' League (the Bund) in 1897; and it provided both the context and the thematic grist for much Yiddish poetry, drama, and fiction from the 1890s onward—including Cahan's Yekl.⁵

The wrongheadedness—even futility—of transcending one's Yiddishkayt was the very crux of Yekl. The plot centers on a blustery and misguided immigrant bent on shedding his Russian Yiddish self and becoming a true Yankee. So intent is he on this transformation that when his wife and son join him in America after a prolonged separation, he recoils, ashamed of their “foreign” demeanor. Under the spell of his Yankee aspirations, Yekl then falls in love with Mamie Fein, a partly Americanized, royally pretentious woman whom he has met in an East Side dancing school. Yekl ends as a “defeated victor,” achieving his freedom from the greenhorn Gitl through divorce, yet sensing vaguely that he has been duped by his own elusive measures of success and happiness.

In this character sketch of a familiar ghetto type, Cahan challenges the tenets of cosmopolitanism on two counts. First, Yekl counters the frequent cosmopolitanist argument that nationalism is necessarily divisive and that assimilation is necessarily a unifying principle, the key to workers' solidarity across ethnic or national lines. On the contrary, in the American context, assimilation itself was among the supreme expressions of bourgeois aspiration. Yekl's quest to become an American “feller” led to Mamie Fein, her money, and the petit bourgeois dream of opening a dancing school of his own. Assimilationism led to Yekl's self-absorption and his sense of superiority to his coworkers. Finally, it led to his fully inhuman attitude toward his wife and compatriot, Gitl: “I am an American feller, a Yankee—that's what I am! What punishment is due me, then, if I cannot stand a shnooza like her?” “‘Ah, may she be killed, the horrid greenhorn!’ he would gasp to himself in a paroxism of despair.”⁶

Cahan underscored the theme of assimilationism as a regressive impulse by the recurrent equation of Americanization with nobility, an unambiguous intimation for his largely socialist readership. Upon her first glimpse of the Americanized Yekl, Gitl remarks that he looks “like a poritz [nobleman]”; and later, confronted with her own mirror image wearing a department store hat, she sees herself as “quite a panenka [noblewoman].” Likewise, when Mamie Fein sweeps through Gitl's apartment for the first time, “apparently dressed for some occasion of state,” Gitl comments sarcastically, “She looks like a veritable panenka. … Was she born here?”⁷ In the world of Yekl, assimilation provided no “broad” alternative to “narrow” nationalism. On the contrary, kindness and decency themselves depended upon a humble acceptance of Yiddishkayt: one of Yekl's rare moments of clarity, a momentary resolution to reform and fulfill his obligation to Gitl, was attended by Old World memories of “the Hebrew words of the Sanctification of the Sabbath” and a homely vision of “a plate of reeking tzimes.”⁸

Cahan's argument that assimilation was undesirable, moreover, was underpinned by an iron contention that it was in fact impossible. This second layer, Cahan's version of dos pintele yid, comprised a constellation of images of which this “plate of reeking tzimes” was but one element. The complex as a whole linked naturalized notions of lineage and kinship (“race” in the broadest instance, “parentage” in the narrower instance) to naturalized conceptions of patriarchal order. Cahan locates dos pintele yid within the rhythms of nature, firmly lashed to notions of race and sex also presumed to be natural.

Yekl's bid to become a real Yankee feller is futile. On the grounds of “race,” the thin veneer of Americanization is ever betrayed by “his Semitic smile” and his “strongly Semitic” eyes. As one of his sweatshop rivals chides, “He thinks that shaving one's mustache makes a Yankee!”⁹ Indeed, it is his attempt to transcend his “natural” self that renders Yekl the buffoon that he is. On the question of whether Judaism is a system of religious belief or a more fundamental element of one's being, Yekl is unequivocal: a Jew, even if fallen away, will always be a Jew. Hence when William Dean Howells identified Cahan as a “Hebrew” and described his ghetto sketches as “so foreign to our race and civilization,” he was not merely expressing an Anglo-Saxon parochialism. This racialist view of the essential “difference” between Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon was embraced on both sides of the presumed barrier.¹⁰

Further, this racialized (which is to say, biologized) view of an immutable Yiddishkayt has a second dimension: for Cahan, as for many of his male colleagues, notions of Yiddishkayt invariably intersected notions of masculinity, femininity, maternal duty, and patriarchal authority. In the case of Yekl, sexuality, like “race,” naturalized the Jewish quintessence. The buffoon-hero's hope of transcending his Old World self is limited by overlapping and enveloping complexes of parentage-as-race and parentage-as-patriarchy. Yekl's doomed quest to escape his own Yiddishkayt is played out almost entirely on the terrain of gender and sexuality. The question of identity that so plagues him is cast as a choice between two women: the cultural conservatism of Gitl, or the rather thin assimilationism of Mamie Fein. Yekl's momentary surrender to “the grip of his past,” his fleeting acceptance of Yiddishkayt and his memory of “reeking tzimes,” is attended by a very particular image of Judaism and the Jewish home: “seated by the side of the head of the little family and within easy reach of the huge brick oven is his old mother, flushed with fatigue, and with an effort keeping her drowsy eyes open to attend, with a devout mien, her husband's prayer.” And again in the final scene, Yekl dimly acknowledges his mistakes and imagines undoing them in these terms: “What if he should now dash into Gitl's apartments and, declaring his authority as husband, father, and lord of the house, fiercely eject the strangers, take [his son] into his arms, and sternly command Gitl to mind her household duties?”¹¹

The gender relations evoked throughout the novel replicate precisely and literally the sexual division of labor that constitutes an essential prop of traditional Judaism. Women were to supply men's physical needs, freeing men for the more important matters of the spirit—including the spiritual needs of women themselves. It was because of their biological function as mothers that women were discounted as legal members of the quorum in prayer; and it was this maternal capacity and its “natural” limitations that Jewish men were to acknowledge in their daily benediction, thanking God “for not having made me a woman.” Cahan thus taps a powerful current of social authority—at once Talmudic and biologic—answering assimilationist aspirations not only with racial certainties of immutable Jewish selfhood but with an eternal Judaism rooted in patriarchy and the eternal feminine. Yekl's futile assimilation-as-denial is ultimately contrasted with Gitl's more organic transformation: with her neighbor Mrs. Kavarsky's help (“Be a mother to me”), Gitl loses her “rustic, ‘greenhorn like’ expression” without betraying her Judaism.¹²

Cahan was not alone among male writers in linking a stable, persistent Yiddishkayt with notions of immutable, conserving femininity. Hence these are the scenes that most captured the unconquerable spirit of Yiddishkayt: a once-pious woman, having fallen under America's ungodly spell, reawakens on Yom Kippur and once again feels at one with “the children of Israel … massed together in every corner of the globe.” An Americanized, “fallen” woman of the ghetto reclaims her Old World self when the chant of the Kol Nidre, drifting up from a shul across the street, awakens in her a nearly pious “sadness in the soul.” “I am not Jenny!” she cries. “I am Zlate.” A daughter of the ghetto, a freethinker overcome by melancholy on Passover, can only ask herself, “Why is this night different from every other night?”—and yet feel certain that it is. A mother of the Old World, upon hearing that her emigrant daughter has married a Christian, rends her garments and recites a prayer for the dead. And as the grip of her parental authority loosens in the New World, another matriarch angrily denounces her daughter as a shikse—a non-Jewish woman.¹³ All of these sketches and the many others like them—by Bernard Goren, Leon Kobrin, and Abraham Reisen—served the same polemic purpose as Cahan's Yekl: they countered cosmopolitanist certainties that Yiddishkayt should—or could—be shed like an unwanted garment.

There is some overlap, to be sure, between the complementary themes of the culture-bearing power of the feminine and the recuperative power of Jewish ritual (the power of the Hebrew words during Yekl's fleeting reawakening, for instance). But in his controversial sketch “What Is He?” Leon Kobrin developed the gendered aspect of this Yiddishist argument even as he captured the nationalist spirit of so much Yiddish literature in America. He had originally written the story in the first person of a man, but he later recast it and added the subtitle, “From the Diary of a Socialist Mother.”¹⁴

“What Is He?” is a monologue in the voice of a freethinking socialist who begins to suspect that in casting off Judaism she has robbed her little boy of his childhood's rightful magic. “What does my little five-year-old … know of Yiddishkayt? What kind of Jew is he?” she asks. As she reflects on the beauty, the mirth, and the depth of feeling in the Jewish tradition, her question becomes, “Where is the poetry of my Nikolai's childhood?” What is there in socialism and the freethinker's concern for broad humanity that could take the place of Hannukah, Pesach, and Purim in the lives of activists' children? The sotzialistke finally works herself up from this simple reflection to a plaintive accusation leveled at the cultural tenets of Jewish socialism: “How come the socialists among other peoples do not take their national holidays away from their children?”

In response to the wave of critical letters that flooded the editorial offices of the Abend blatt in response to the sketch, Kobrin wrote a second, even stronger statement, titled “Yes, What Is He?” “What is my Nikolai?” asked the sotzialistke again. “What will he grow into in this indefinite grey reality?—in this mish mash of ours, without life, without light, and without the sunny warmth of a festive childhood?” Reviewing the Jewish calendar of festivals and recounting its joys at length, Kobrin's sotzialistke exclaims, “What poetic nectar for the spirit of a child!” Yiddishkayt, these sketches argued, was being unnecessarily sacrificed on the altar of cosmopolitanism. Like young Nikolai, the Jewish socialist in the age of Dreyfus was “cut off from his own people, but had no bonds with the stranger.”¹⁵ And again, it was the Jewish mother, never to be estranged from tradition, who stepped forward to make the case.

Such Yiddishist arguments did not go unanswered. The most vocal and active polemicist among the cosmopolitanists was Jacob Gordin, whose realist dramas were singlehandedly redirecting the Yiddish theater in New York. “He who will make of a man a nationalist will drag that man back,” Gordin insisted in his much-heralded debate with Yiddishist Chaim Zhitlowsky.¹⁶ Indeed, his popular plays in the realist mode were antinationalist in intent. But there was more than mere irony entailed in the effort to minimize the significance of Jewish identity through literary and dramatic works cast in a language spoken only by Jews. Both the cosmopolitanist intent and its pitfalls are ever discernible in Gordin's writings.

In “What Sings the Jew,” for instance, a festive, motley gathering of emigrants entertain one another on shipboard en route from Hamburg to New York by performing their national anthems. When the cry went up that it was the Jews' turn, “Only a mournful, ironic smile played on their lips.” There was, of course, no song to sing. But to everyone's surprise (and to the Gentiles' derision), “Israelik the pauper” agreed to sing. He sang the Kol Nidre, and Gordin's jeering onlookers were transformed by the Jewish song: “Unwillingly each of the goyim began to feel and to understand that he was hearing an old, holy, historical song which told of many human troubles and sufferings, which bitterly lamented the lost past and asked with pain what would be found in the future. … A melancholy feeling stole into the heart of everyone.”¹⁷

The promise held up by the story's content—that humanity may indeed be united above the narrow divisions of national anthems like “Deutschland über alles” or “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela”—is broken by its Yiddishist narrative frame. Like the classic Yiddish tales by Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Macher Sforim, Gordin's story is founded on types and prototypes. Israelik can only be understood to represent “a Jew,” and hence the transcendent power of his song can only suggest the superior ethics and culture of Judaism. With its emphasis on group identity even as it describes a universalizing sentiment, the tale is chauvinistic in spite of itself: in sharp contrast to the goyim, whose behavior is mean-spirited and whose songs are divisive, “the Jew” emerges as the moral superior in the social relations in this microcosm of humanity, just as only the Jewish tradition has the power to unite peoples across ethnic or national boundaries. The tale simultaneously holds out and revokes the cosmopolitanist promise of true internationalism.

Or again, “In Prayer Garments—A Fact” was Jacob Gordin's answer to those, like Cahan and Kobrin, for whom Jewish socialism was rooted irretrievably in Jewish identity. For Gordin, a persistent ethnic attachment leads only to despair: “Jacob knew that he was a Jew, and, as a Jew, he was born only to have worries, had children only to have worries, and with his troubles he schlepped himself over from Russia to America—to have worries.” One morning, as he stood by the window with his prayer garments on, watching the “worried and depressed” passersby and listening to his children begging for food in the next room, and as he asked himself whether there was no other joy in life than “the love of one's God,” he opened the window and leapt out. Fully comprehending this man's life and his death, those who gathered around his body on the street below “dared not tell a lie”—they dared not utter the prayer for the dead, “Blessed be the true judge.”¹⁸ Through the refusal of the passersby to “tell a lie,” to recite the prayer, Gordin rejects the Jewish tradition as politically paralyzing. Nonetheless, his tale conveys a totalizing experience of uniquely Jewish “worries” that undermines the argument that Jewishness can be shed like an unwanted garment. “This little song about the Jewish quintessence and about the Jewish soul is very beautiful and sweet,” he would argue in his famous debate with Yiddishist Chaim Zhitlowsky, “but it is no more than a lyrical feeling.” And yet his own stories portrayed a Jewishness that ran much deeper than sweet little songs.¹⁹

Despite the stubborn limitations of cosmopolitanist polemic in Yiddish, Gordin's works do attest to the currency of the debate over the “quintessence of the Jew” for this generation of immigrant writers; and his works do help to identify the proper ideological context within which so much Yiddish cultural production in America emerged. Here, as in Cahan's writing, it is not so much “America” that is at issue but “the Jew” himself.

Many of these works seem to address purely “American” themes of immigration, settlement, readjustment, and “assimilation,” but they ultimately demonstrate a deeper, more abiding commitment to questions and passions actually transnational in scope. While the novels, stories, and plays of Abraham Cahan, Leon Kobrin, and Jacob Gordin indeed depict life in the New World in its various dimensions, so are they framed by questions of Jewishness whose derivation and urgency have less to do with American life than with the crisis for Jews posed by vicious pogroms in the East and the Dreyfus Affair in the West. At the heart of Yiddish-American fiction, beneath an announced concern for questions of “Americanization” or “assimilation,” lingered a vigorous Old World debate over nationalist and cosmopolitanist responses to “the Jewish Question.” The most famous such work, indeed, was Israel Zangwill's Melting Pot itself—the play that has given us our most familiar metaphor for a distinctly American brand of diversity, notwithstanding Zangwill's engagement in the Jewish Question and in the debate over territorialism. The literature of immigration may represent a crucial chapter in American literary history, to be sure, but it is important to keep in mind that many immigrant writers counted themselves primarily emigrant writers, and it was not always the Americanness of the chapter that was foremost on their minds as they were writing.

Notes

1. Jules Chametzky, From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).

2. This argument is condensed from Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 1. See Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jews Under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Schocken, 1964); Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Walter Lacqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken, 1978).

3. Baron, Russian Jews; Vital, Origins; Lacqueur, History of Zionism.

4. Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben (New York: Forverts Association, 1926), vol. 3, pp. 158, 158-165.

5. Jacobson, Special Sorrows, chapter 3.

6. Abraham Cahan, Yekl, the Imported Bridegroom, and Other Stories (New York: Dover, 1970), pp. 70, 44.

7. Ibid., pp. 35, 36, 40, 52.

8. Ibid., pp. 30-31.

9. Ibid., pp. 3, 5, 6.

10. Howells, quoted in Bernard G. Richards, “Abraham Cahan Cast in a New Role,” in Cahan, Yekl, p. vii. On turn-of-the-century versions of racialized Jewishness, see John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); Sander Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siecle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Looking Jewish / Seeing Jews: ‘Race’ and Perception,” in Becoming Caucasian: Vicissitudes of Whiteness in American Political Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

11. Cahan, Yekl, pp. 30, 89. Susan Kress, “Women and Marriage in Abraham Cahan's Fiction,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 26-39.

12. Paula Hyman “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition,” in Elizabeth Koltun, ed., The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives (New York: Schocken, 1976), pp. 105-113, at 109; Saul Berman, “The Status of Women in Halakhic Judaism,” in Koltun, Jewish Woman, pp. 114-128; Anne Goldfeld, “Women as Sources of Torah in the Rabbinic Tradition,” in Koltun, Jewish Woman, p. 258; A. Cohen, Everyman's Talmud (New York: Schocken, 1975), pp. 159-161; Adin Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud (New York: Bantam, 1976), pp. 137-144; Cahan, Yekl, pp. 65, 83.

13. Bernard Gorin, “Yom Kippur,” Abend Blatt, September 12, 1899, p. 2; Leon Kobrin, “Jenny's Kol Nidre,” in Gezamlte shriften (New York: Hebrew Publishing, 1910), pp. 197-209; Leon Kobrin, “Anna's Ma-nishtane,” in Abend Blatt, March 25, 1899, p. 2, and Gezamlte shriften pp. 675-679; Leon Kobrin, “Borekh dyan emes,” in Gezamlte shriften, pp. 197-209, and “Ver iz shuldig?” in Gezamlte Shriften, pp. 87-101.

14. Leon Kobrin, “Vos iz er?” The version collected in Gezamlte shriften, pp. 614-620, dated 1897, has a male narrator. The version that Kobrin quoted and discussed years later in his autobiography, Mayn fuftzik yohr in America (New York: YKUF, 1966), pp.191-200 (also dated 1897), and a somewhat shorter variation that ran in Abend Blatt, May 18, 1899, p. 2, both have a female narrator and bear the subtitle “oys a togbukh fun a muter a sotsialistke.”

15. Leon Kobrin, “Yo, vos iz er?” in Mayn fuftzik yohr, pp. 191-200.

16. Jacob Gordin, “Natzionalismus un asimilatzion,” in Ale shriften (New York: Hebrew Publishing, 1910), vol. 4, pp. 281, 267-284.

17. Jacob Gordin, “Vos zingt der yid?” (c. 1897) in Ertzaylungen (New York: Der internatzionale bibliotek, 1908), pp. 116-121.

18. Jacob Gordin, “In tales un tfilin: a fakt” in Ertzaylungen, pp. 93-95.

19. Gordin, “Natzionalismus un assimilatzion,” p. 272.