SOURCE: "Yiddishkeit," in Commentary, Vol. 61, No. 4, April, 1976, pp. 83-6.

Alter is an American educator and critic who specializes in Hebrew literature. In the following review, he praises World of Our Fathers for its comprehensiveness and its illumination of the paradoxes governing Yiddish immigrant culture.

There is a haunting phrase at the end of the introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, written twenty-two years ago by Irving Howe in collaboration with Eliezer Greenberg, which lingers in the imagination because it defines an impelling paradox of Jewish existence. Howe and Greenberg, after seventy-one luminous pages which trace the backgrounds and the guiding assumptions of Yiddish literature, ruefully note how this once folk-oriented literature now survives in isolated pockets of writers and readers still stubbornly clinging "to a language which for them is not only history but the answer to history." It is an answer for them, of course, as...