The geschaft, perhaps someone s living room or kitchen used for socializing, or a picnic as a looked-for event these are the boundary markers of their daily experience of America. The various writers of New Yorkish want their characters to stay within this orbit, making their lives opportunities to explore frustration and sometimes moral triumph. A good number of these stories are poignant. You can hear Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Flaubert, and Zola as well as Peretz and Aleichem echoing in sketches about forlorn love, the vainglorious boasting of small-time bosses, the hysteria of people trapped in sour marriages, and the obstacles facing the small man. Writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis transformed the American landscape into a metaphor for emotional and intellectual impasse, thereby encouraging other writers to see how locale itself summarizes and represents maturation.
Literary traditions are prologues.
The stories in New Yorkish are tryings out of the American experience. Yet the Yiddish writers of this volume had an enabling background. This familiarity of scene freed the writer from having to introduce to the reader an unfamiliar background. The present could be quickly sketched, allowing the author to focus on character and intention. I have no idea.