SOURCE: Jacobson, Matthew Frye. “‘The Quintessence of the Jew’: Polemics of Nationalism and Peoplehood in Turn-of-the-Century Yiddish Fiction.” In Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors, pp. 103-11. New York and London: New York University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Jacobson discusses the changing nature of Jewish identity in America through the works of Cahan and other Yiddish writers.

Among the first and most famous pieces of Yiddish literature in the United States is Yekl, Abraham Cahan's account of a tragicomic Russian Jew who wants nothing more than to become, in his words, “a real Yankee feller.” Because it found its way into English early on (it appeared in Yiddish in 1893 and in English in 1895), the novella has attracted more critical attention and has reached a wider audience than any other piece of Yiddish-American fiction. Indeed, Yekl was introduced to an...