The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XVIII. Later National Literature, Part III.
§ 48. Minor Skitze Writer
Within the last decade numerous lesser short story writers have arisen. Some of them display qualities that justify hopeful expectations. Proletarian tendencies do not appear in their work. B. Botwinik, though crude in style at times, is arresting and thoughtful. Yenta Serdatsky has written a number of stories concerning the deracination of the later Jewish-Russian intellectuals who have become a cross between complacent bourgeois and spiritual malcontent. M. Osherowitz is another of the “skitze” writers whose heroes are exclusively of this new type, perhaps the most piteous among all the immigrants.
The school of the “young” is also strongly represented in fiction. Its followers have ushered in the longer story and the novel. I. Opatoshu is not a traditional Ghetto writer, for erotic passion is his main subject. His Polische Welder, however, is less open to objections on the part of the conservative critic. He has been called the originator of the Yiddish historical novel. David Ignatov is a “young” novelist who likes to write of men of indomitable will moving in an atmosphere of the elemental and the infinite, quite out of the Yiddish realistic tradition.