These authors were not enclave writers. Their past, so their works argue, was not a future to be achieved. They wanted their characters to participate in the capacious and worldly present. The stories in New Yorkish are secular and often disputatious, critiquing the American dream by often dealing with the laboring day and an economy of seasonal work portrayed in terms of personal life. The New Yorkish writers knew that there is an economy of, and in, passion.
Protagonists bemoan their dark fate and become helpless as jobs and enterprises collapse.
These writers discovered that character is richer than its circumstances. It seems to me that the stories in this work fight against abstraction, in gathering the social immensity of individuality that can be revealed only at the moment pressure is applied to the present. The conservatism of the will is revealed. What might start to read as a simple proletarian tale, Peretz Hirshbein s moving At the Threshold, for instance, cuts against the grain of expected historical materialism. In Europe, a young girl whose mother accepts a sewing machine and a free apartment is promised to a rich American suitor.