ABSTRACT
The American Yiddish critic Borekh Rivkin argued that Opatoshu was the first writer who created a Yiddish 'literary territory' in America by representing American landscapes as physical space. Urban, industrial, and agricultural landscapes in their regional variations served as vehicles for symbolic representations of subjective feelings and states of mind of individual characters as well as religious, political, and cultural ideas. The new modernist style inaugurated by Di Yunge transformed the literary image of New York. From an inanimate backdrop of humorous sketches or conventional melodramas it became a powerful material and spiritual force actively shaping the lives and fates of literary characters. Inspired by the symbolist representations of the city by the Russian writers Andrei Bely and Fiodor Sologub, Ignatov portrayed New York as a brutal and inhuman riz, a giant monster which crushed bodies and minds of its little residents entangled in the vast grid of streets and avenues.
