Nine Yiddish Writers
seemed to glisten in the distance; his genius blossomed in the eighties, when the first blast of the pogroms wiped out all light and hope; and his life expired just a few weeks ago, amidst the deluge of blood that came pouring upon the Jewish communities in the wake of the terrible war.
The old Jewish myth endowed the Jewish race with three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This myth is a reality in Yiddish literature. Its fathers are indeed three, though, unlike the fabled analogy, they were all of the same generation. Two of them are still among the living—Abramovitz who has nearly completed his eightieth year, and Rabinovitz, who is but a few years younger than was his deceased colleague, Perez.
We term them fathers in no mere figurative sense. With them Yiddish literature was born. They created it out of nothingness. Before them all was chaos. Abramovitz was the first on the scene, and to his lot fell a great part of the preparatory work. He cleared the ground of the rubbish with which it was covered, ploughed it and turned the sod. Like Abraham, the first of the Patriarchs, Abramowitz discovered the God, the spirit of Yiddish literature, and entered into a covenant with it. Before him
[ 16 ]
