ABSTRACT
America, the Soviet Union, Poland: the printing history of Joseph Opatoshu's novel Di tentserin provides an illuminating example of both the expansion of Yiddish cultural activity across oceans and seas in the 1920s and the growing significance of the Yiddish literary centre in America during this decade. Opatoshu intended Di tentserin to be comprehensive in its scope and ambitious thematically. He did not seek to portray some remote corner of Jewish life or marginal characters, as interesting as they may be. The very nature of Yiddish culture in America, which was at once both a mass and an immigrant culture, prescribed a set course for the publication of a novel such as Di tentserin. The lines that Epshteyn drew connecting Di tentserin and In poylishe velder provided him with the opportunity to articulate his unequivocally negative verdict regarding the ideological underpinnings of Opatoshu's American novel.
