SOURCE: "Poet of the Jewish Middle Class: Clifford Odets Voices Its Conflicts and Frustrations" in Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1946, pp. 17-22.

Warshow was a Jewish-American editor, essayist, and film critic. In the following essay, he discusses Odets's Awake and Sing! and its realistic portrayal of the common Jewish-American experience of its time.

Before migrating to America, all the ethnic groups of Yankee City possessed a family pattern of the patriarchal type in which the wife was subordinated to the husband and the children to the father. America has disrupted this pattern, increasing the wife's independence and making the children carriers of the new culture—a role that has brought them into open conflict with their parents. Among Jews these developments manifested themselves in their most extreme form.—"The Jews of Yankee City" (Commentary, January 1946)

The literary treatment of American Jewish life has always suffered from the psychological commitments...