Even as the story of early 20th century American Yiddish culture awaits adequate scholarly treatment, Noah Steinberg’s Yung amerike (“Young America”) is an essential work for those seeking entry into this too-frequently forgotten cultural realm. Steinberg offers a mixture of personal reflection and literary critique, focusing on the generation of Yiddish writers known as Di yunge – “the young ones.” Including Dovid Ignatov, Zishe Landoy, Mani Leyb, Moyshe Nadir, H. Leyvik, Joseph Opatoshu, and Moyshe Leyb Halpern, di yunge arrived to America’s shores at the turn of the century right on the cultural, linguistic, and religious thresholds of modernity. These writers found in the new Yiddish literature a means of exploring the individual experience in all of its mundaneness, rather than proclaiming the proletarian, sweatshop ideologies of the masses. Even though di yunge would come under attack from subsequent literati for what Yankev Glatstheyn termed their self-satisfied “thoughtlessness and contentlessness”, di yunge did much to make Yiddish literature and culture cosmopolitan, most notably through their refinement of classical poetic forms and translations of world poetry into Yiddish.

Steinberg sometimes lapses into what one Menorah Journal reviewer called “sycophantic admiration and all the abuses of the newspaper interview at its worst.” But he has also favored us here with some doses of trenchant literary criticism, thus making his study an important companion volume to the handful of anthologies of American Yiddish poetry and prose.