"To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe," Delmore Schwartz has written, "is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author." Novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and essayist, Jerome Weidman bears witness to the moral and cultural influences of his childhood on New York's Lower East Side, where, Weidman recalled years later, there were "two cultures at war with each other"--the immigrant sensibility shared by almost everyone over the age of thirty and the sense of dislocation shared by their first-generation American children. He heard two languages throughout his childhood, one spoken with ease in the home, the other spoken by young Weidman in the streets and at school but spoken poorly by his parents. Drawing upon that duality and upon a heightened sensitivity to the nuances of dialect and character, he has created an impressive canon of fiction and drama...