has been at all times keenly responsive to the creative forces in Jewish life, helpfully proud of the best impulses, intellectual and spiritual, in the Jewish community. For here, set down at a time when reputations were still in the balance, are judgments which time has sustained and insights which are no less pointed because they have won general acceptance.
It must be clear to that friend of Yiddish literature, who is also a reader in it, that these critical sketches of Rogoff's have their validity in our own time. A reading of them, fifteen years after they were written, shows that they were a natural outgrowth of that movement of self-analysis and self-criticism of which American Yiddish literature stood so greatly in need. Although creative workers are never too numerous, Yiddish writers were plentiful. The controversies of the, day pointed to the need of some clarification of the diverse impulses which were alive in the literary movements of those days.
To that unsettled period Rogoff brought his contribution of a sound critical mind reinforced by familiarity with the criteria that have shaped the great literatures of the world.
His discernment and critical honesty gave him the
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