ABSTRACT
In a 1954 essay Joseph Opatoshu offers his assessment of Yiddish culture in America over the previous six decades, starting with the Sweatshop poets and the first issue of the journal Di Tsukunft, and concluding with perhaps surprising optimism about the continued vitality of Yiddish in America after the Holocaust. For the American Yiddish writer, consequently, the natural habitat for Yiddish culture, and the primary measurement of cultural authenticity, a value in Opatoshu's critical universe, whatever readers luxuriating in their own post-modernism may think of the concept, is to be found for the American Yiddishist, like the Polish nationalist in exile, not where he or she is, but where he or she is from. A more interesting literary and linguistic problem presents itself, however, when describing Black characters not as an ethnic type, but as people interacting with other people.
