In all that has been written about the plays of Clifford Odets it is odd that little attention has been paid to the fact that first and foremost these plays are Jewish, and that Mr. Odets himself is a direct descendant of those playwrights such as Gordon and Lubin who once made the Yiddish theatre in America so extraordinarily vital. What has been impressive in Mr. Odets's plays has not been their ideas, which are usually pretty confused, or their structure, which has been pretty melodramatic, but the fact that the characterizations and the dialogue have a bite and an originality of turn which set them apart from the somewhat pallid characters and dialogue of most modern plays. It is true that Mr. Odets's people often shout at the top of their lungs, that their emotion is unrestrained, and at times they utter appalling banalities with an air of owlish wisdom. But all in all their vitality, both emotional and intellectual, is a welcome relief equally from chatterers or sophisticated nothings and from people who are all hard-boiled surface, with no intelligence underneath. Mr. Odets's people are at once primitive and intelligent, and it is this antinomy which imparts to them their color and variety. Neither of these qualities are hurt by the fact that their emotion is not strong enough to conquer their intelligence nor their intelligence deep or keen enough to kill their emotion. It is this struggle of emotion with intelligence which is the basis of much of the great drama of the world, and it is this struggle which is abundantly evident in the half-Americanized Jews of Mr. Odets.
A man familiar with the Yiddish drama told me recently that many of Odets's most pungent speeches are practically direct translations from the Yiddish, and it is this that makes the dialogue so alive and vital. It is dialogue, not created by the dramatist, but inherited by him from the speech of his people, which gives the feeling at once personal and universal which informs the talk in all his plays and notably in his latest success, "Rocket to the Moon." Up to the present Mr. Odets has given no sign of understanding people other than his own type of Jewish-Americans, and for this reason it is not well to hope for the great American play from him; indeed it is unfair…. But as a dramatist of the melting-pot he is unique and unapproached.
Grenville Vernon, "Clifford Odets," in Commonweal (copyright © 1938 Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.), Vol. XXIX, No. 8, December 16, 1938, p. 215.
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