The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate department of American literature.  From Denmark, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the chronicles of their migration.  As the first Americans contended with nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths.  Even when the immigrants write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather than the failures in the process of Americanization.

Not all the stocks, of course, are equally interested in fiction or gifted at it:  the Russian Jews have the most notable novels to their credit.  Though these are generally composed by men not born in this country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated, belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the nation.  Shalom Aleichem’s Jewish Children and Leon Kobrin’s A Lithuanian Village surely belong, though their scenes are laid in Europe; as do Sholom Asch’s vivid, moving novels Mottke the Vagabond—­concerned with the underworld of Poland—­and Uncle Moses—­concerned with the New York Ghetto—­the recent translations of which are slowly bringing to a wider American public the evidence that a really eminent novelist has hitherto been partly hidden by his alien tongue.

There is no question whatever that the work of Abraham Cahan, Yiddish scholar, journalist, novelist, belongs to the American nation.  As far back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with his Maggie, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan produced in Yekl a book of similar and practically equal merit concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough.  But it and his later books The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories and The White Terror and the Red have been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing with more familiar communities.  The same has been true even of his masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels, The Rise of David Levinsky.  It, too, records the making of an American, originally a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal figure in the cloak and suit trade in America.  But it does more than trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures:  it traces the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted