SOURCE: "Odets' Yinglish: The Psychology of Dialect as Dialogue," in Studies in American Jewish Literature—From Marginality to Mainstream: A Mosaic of Jewish Writers, State University of New York Press, Vol. 2, 1982, pp. 61-68.

Cantor is an American educator, editor, and non-fiction author. In the following essay, he examines Odets's use of Yinglish—a blend of Yiddish and English language—and its important function in his early plays.

Odets' Yinglish is only one facet in the development of what I have argued elsewhere was a rich poetic dialogue with roots in the Emersonian tradition. Like Emerson's disciple, Whitman, Odets created in his work a barbaric yawp (he used the word "yawping" in The Big Knife) that was original and distinctive enough to express his individual impressions of urbanized twentieth-century America—a rhythmic utterance capable of conveying precisely the myths and ethos of middle class life that previous playwrights, such...