Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York

“No American fiction of the year merits recognition more than this Russian’s stories of Yiddish life. … [Mr. Cahan] is a humorist, and his humor does not spare the sordid and uncouth aspects of the character whose pathos he so tenderly reveals.” — William Dean Howells

In Yekl, the central problem derives from a social condition: the urgent desire of the hero to become a real American, to be less a “greenhorn”; but the play of events is around an emotional crisis; Yekl no longer loves the wife he left behind, who has now rejoined him in the new land, and who seems to him shockingly European.In The Imported Bridegroom, the issue is apparently religious, a clash between traditional faith and secularism; but we are left wondering whether philosophy has not become commingled with sociology. Other stories deal with sweatshop life, romance in the slums, a wedding in the ghetto.